Chapter I
John
1204-1216

[Sidenote:  England and the Conquest]

The loss of Normandy did more than drive John from the foreign dominions of his race; it set him face to face with England itself.  England was no longer a distant treasure-house from which gold could be drawn for wars along the Epte or the Loire, no longer a possession to be kept in order by wise ministers and by flying visits from its foreign king.  Henceforth it was his home.  It was to be ruled by his personal and continuous rule.  People and sovereign were to know each other, to be brought into contact with each other as they had never been brought since the conquest of the Norman.  The change in the attitude of the king was the more momentous that it took place at a time when the attitude of the country itself was rapidly changing.  The Norman Conquest had given a new aspect to the land.  A foreign king ruled it through foreign ministers.  Foreign nobles were quartered in every manor.  A military organization of the country changed while it simplified the holding of every estate.  Huge castles of white stone bridled town and country; huge stone minsters told how the Norman had bridled even the Church.  But the change was in great measure an external one.  The real life of the nation was little affected by the shock of the Conquest.  English institutions, the local, judicial, and administrative forms of the country were the same as of old.  Like the English tongue they remained practically unaltered.  For a century after the Conquest only a few new words crept in from the language of the conquerors, and so entirely did the spoken tongue of the nation at large remain unchanged that William himself tried to learn it that he might administer justice to his subjects.  Even English literature, banished as it was from the court of the stranger and exposed to the fashionable rivalry of Latin scholars, survived not only in religious works, in poetic paraphrases of gospels and psalms, but in the great monument of our prose, the English Chronicle.  It was not till the miserable reign of Stephen that the Chronicle died out in the Abbey of Peterborough.  But the “Sayings of AElfred” show a native literature going on through the reign of Henry the Second, and the appearance of a great work of English verse coincides in point of time with the return of John to his island realm.  “There was a priest in the land whose name was Layamon; he was the son of Leovenath; may the Lord be gracious to him!  He dwelt at Earnley, a noble church on the bank of Severn (good it seemed to him!) near Radstone, where he read books.  It came to mind to him and in his chiefest thought that he would tell the noble deeds of England, what the men were named and whence they came who first had English land.”  Journeying far and wide over the country, the priest of Earnley found Baeda and Wace, the books too of St. Albin and St. Austin.  “Layamon laid down these books and turned the