THE NORMAN CONQUEST. A.D. 1035--1066.
Cnut left three sons; but one was content to be only King of Denmark,
and the other two died very soon. So a great English nobleman, called
Earl Godwin, set up as king, Edward, one of those sons of Ethelred the
Unready who had been sent away to Normandy. He was a very kind, good,
pious man, who loved to do good. He began the building of our grand
church at Westminster Abbey, and he was so holy that he was called the
Confessor, which is a word for good men not great enough to be called
saints. He was too good-natured, as you will say when you hear that
one day, when he was in bed, he saw a thief come cautiously into his
room, open the chest where his treasure was, and take out the money-
bags. Instead of calling anyone, or seizing the man, the king only
said, sleepily, "Take care, you rogue, or my chancellor will catch
you and give you a good whipping."
You can fancy that nobody much minded such a king as this, and so
there were many disturbances in his time. Some of them rose out of
the king--who had been brought up in Normandy--liking the Normans
better than the English. They really were much cleverer and more
sensible, for they had learnt a great deal in France, while the
English had forgotten much of what Alfred and his sons had taught
them, and all through the long, sad reign of Ethelred had been getting
more dull, and clumsy and rude. Moreover, they had learnt of the Danes
to be sad drunkards; but both they and the Danes thought the Norman
French fine gentlemen, and could not bear the sight of them.
Think, then, how angry they all were when it began to be said that King
Edward wanted to leave his kingdom of England to his mother's Norman
nephew, Duke William, because all his own near relations were still
little boys, not likely to be grown up by the time the old king died.
Many of the English wished for Harold, the son of Earl Godwin, a brave,
spirited man; but Edward sent him to Normandy, and there Duke William
made him swear an oath not to do anything to hinder the kingdom from
being given to Duke William.
Old King Edward died soon after, and Harold said at once that his
promise had been forced and cheated from him, so that he need not
keep it, and he was crowned King of England. This filled William
with anger. He called all his fighting Normans together, fitted
out ships, and sailed across the English Channel to Dover. The
figure-head of his own ship was a likeness of his second little boy,
named William. He landed at Pevensey, in Sussex, and set up his camp
while Harold was away in the North, fighting with a runaway brother
of his own, who had brought the Norwegians to attack Yorkshire.
Harold had just won a great battle over these enemies when he heard
that William and his Normans had landed, and he had to hurry the
whole length of England to meet them.
Many of the English would not join him, because they did not want him
for their king. But though his army was not large, it was very brave.
When he reached Sussex, he placed all his men on the top of a low hill,
near Hastings, and caused them to make a fence all round, with a ditch
before it, and in the middle was his own standard, with a fighting man
embroidered upon it. Then the Normans rode up on their war-horses to
attack him, one brave knight going first, singing. The war-horses
stumbled in the ditch, and the long spears of the English killed both
men and horses. Then William ordered his archers to shoot their
arrows high in the air. They came down like hail into the faces and
on the heads of the English. Harold himself was pierced by one in the
eye. The Normans charged the fence again, and broke through; and, by
the time night came on, Harold himself and all his brave Englishmen
were dead. They did not flee away; they all staid, and were killed,
fighting to the last; and only then was Harold's standard of the
fighting man rooted up, and William's standard--a cross, which had
been blessed by the Pope--planted instead of it. So ended the battle
of Hastings, in the year 1066.
The land has had a great many "conquests" hitherto--the Roman conquest,
the English conquest, and now the Norman conquest. But there have
been no more since; and the kings and queens have gone on in one long
line ever since, from William of Normandy down to Queen Victoria.