Not long after came the terrible “hundred years war,” wherein Englishmen, led by the descendants of their Norman and French conquerors, retaliated upon Normandy and France the woes they had themselves endured.  Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt avenged Hastings; the siege of Rouen under Henry the Fifth was a strange Nemesis.  During that century the state of France was almost as sad as that of England during the earlier period; it was but a field for English youth to learn the arts of warfare at the expense of the wretched inhabitants.

But these events, sad or glorious, as the reader, according to his age, may consider them, were long subsequent to the date of our tale; they may, however, well be before the mind of the youthful student as he sighs over the woes of the Conquest.

Two remarks which the writer has made in the prefaces to the former Chronicles he will venture to repeat, as essential to the subject in each case.

He has not, as is so common with authors who treat of this period, clothed the words of his speakers in an antique phraseology.  He feels sure that men and boys spoke a language as free and easy in the times in question as our compatriots do now.  We cannot present the Anglo-Saxon or Norman French they really used, and to load the work with words culled from Chaucer would be simply an anachronism; hence he has freely translated the speech of his characters into the modern vernacular.

Secondly, he always calls the Anglo-Saxons as they called themselves, “English;” the idea prevalent some time since, and which even finds its place in the matchless story of Ivanhoe, or in that striking novelette by Charles Mackay, “The Camp of Refuge,” that they called themselves or were called “Saxons,” is now utterly exploded among historians.  It is true the Welsh, the Picts, and Scots called them by that designation, and do still; {iii} but they had but one name for themselves, as the pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle make manifest—­“Englishmen.”  Nor did their Norman conquerors affect to call them by any other title, although in their mouths the honoured appellation was, as we have said, but a term of reproach {iv}.

The author has chosen his two heroes, Wilfred and Etienne, if heroes they can be called, as types of the English and Norman youth of the period, alike in their merits and in their vices.  The effects of adversity on the one, and of success and dominant pride on the other—­happily finally subdued in each case beneath the Cross on Calvary—­form the chief attempt at “character painting” in the tale.

It is not without a feeling of regret that he sends forth from his hands the last of these “Chronicles,” and bids farewell to the real and imaginary characters who have seemed to form a part of his world, almost as if he could grasp their hands or look into their faces.

They are interwoven, too, with many treasured remembrances of past days, of the listening crowd of boys, now scattered through the world, and lost to the sight of the narrator, but who once by their eager interest encouraged the speaker, and at whose request the earliest of these tales was written.  Happy indeed would he be, could he hope the written page would arouse the same interest, which the spoken narrative undoubtedly created, or the tales had never been published.