prising folk. The Normans were temperate in food and drink, highly educated, as education went in those days, restless, and fiery. They brought England back by the scruff of the neck into the family of European nations, back into close touch with the Roman Church, to which a series of vigorous and clever popes was then giving a new life. Such remains of Roman ideas of government and order as were left in Europe were saved for us by the Normans. The great Roman empire was like a ship that had been wrecked on a beach; its cargo was plundered by nation after nation. But if any nation had got the lion’s snare of its leavings it was the Frenchmen, and through the Frenchmen the Normans, and through the Normans the English.
The Conquest completed, 1066–1072.It cost William about six years of utterly ruthless warfare to become master of all England. England resisted him bit by bit; its leaders had a dozen different plans; he had but one plan, and he drove it through. He was going to make an England that would resist the next invader as one people. He had to do terrible things: he had to harry all Yorkshire into a desert; he had to drive all the bravest English leaders into forest and fen, or over the Scottish border, and to kill them when he caught them. He spared no man who stood In his way, but he spared all who asked his mercy. He could not subdue Scotland; but once he marched to the Tay and brought the Scottish King Malcolm to his knees for the time.
The great Norman landowners.William could not quite give up the plan of governing England by great earls; he was obliged to reward the most powerful of his French followers with huge grants of English land; and these followers, who had been quite accustomed to rebel against him in Normandy,