We must imagine, he adds, two nations on the surface of the same country:  the Normans, rich and free from taxes; the English (for the term Saxon is an anachronism), poor, dependent, and oppressed with burdens; the one living in vast mansions or embattled castles, the other in thatched cabins or half-ruined huts; the one people idle, happy, doing nought but fight or hunt, the other, men of sorrow and toil—­labourers and mechanics; on the one side, luxury and insolence; on the other, misery and envy,—­not the envy of the poor at the sight of the riches of others, but of the despoiled in presence of the spoilers.

These countries touched each other in every point, and yet were more distinct than if the sea rolled between them.  Each had its language:  in the abbeys and castles they only spoke French; in the huts and cabins, the old English.

No words can describe the insolence and disdain of the conquerors, which is feebly pictured in the Etienne de Malville of the present tale.  The very name of which the descendants of these Normans grew proud, and which they adorned by their deeds on many a field of battle—­the English name—­was used as a term of the utmost contempt.  “Do you think me an Englishman?” was the inquiry of outraged pride.

Not only Normans, but Frenchmen, Bretons—­nay, Continentals of all nations, flocked into England as into an uninhabited country, slew and took possession.

“Ignoble grooms,” says an old chronicler, “did as they pleased with the best and noblest, and left them nought to wish for but death.  These licentious knaves were amazed at themselves; they went mad with pride and astonishment, at beholding themselves so powerful—­at having servants richer than their own fathers had been {i}.”  Whatever they willed they deemed permissible to do; they shed blood at random, tore the bread from the very mouths of the famished people, and took everything—­money, goods, lands {ii}.  Such was the fate which befell the once happy Anglo-Saxons.

And it was not till after a hundred and forty years of slavery, that the separation of England from Normandy, in the days of the cowardly and cruel King John, and the signing of Magna Carta, gave any real relief to the oppressed; while it was later still, not till after the days of Simon de Montfort, when resistance to new foreigners had welded Norman and English into one, that the severed races became really united, as Englishmen alike.  Then the greatest of the Plantagenets, Edward the First, the pupil of the man he slew at Evesham, was proud to call himself an Englishman—­the first truly English king since the days of the hapless Harold; and one of whom, in spite of the misrepresentations of Scottish historians and novelists, English boys may be justly proud:  his noble legislation was the foundation of that modern English jurisprudence, in which all are alike in the eyes of the law.