leaves; he beheld them lovingly; may the Lord be gracious to him!  Pen he took with finger and wrote a book-skin, and the true words set together, and compressed the three books into one.”  Layamon’s church is now that of Areley, near Bewdley in Worcestershire; his poem was in fact an expansion of Wace’s “Brut” with insertions from Baeda.  Historically it is worthless; but as a monument of our language it is beyond all price.  In more than thirty thousand lines not more than fifty Norman words are to be found.  Even the old poetic tradition remains the same.  The alliterative metre of the earlier verse is still only slightly affected by riming terminations; the similes are the few natural similes of Caedmon; the battle-scenes are painted with the same rough, simple joy.

[Sidenote:  English Patriotism]

Instead of crushing England, indeed, the Conquest did more than any event that had gone before to build up an English people.  All local distinctions, the distinction of Saxon from Mercian, of both from Northumbrian, died away beneath the common pressure of the stranger.  The Conquest was hardly over when we see the rise of a new national feeling, of a new patriotism.  In his quiet cell at Worcester the monk Florence strives to palliate by excuses of treason or the weakness of rulers the defeats of Englishmen by the Danes.  AElfred, the great name of the English past, gathers round him a legendary worship, and the “Sayings of AElfred” embody the ideal of an English king.  We see the new vigour drawn from this deeper consciousness of national unity in a national action which began as soon as the Conquest had given place to strife among the conquerors.  A common hostility to the conquering baronage gave the nation leaders in its foreign sovereigns, and the sword which had been sheathed at Senlac was drawn for triumphs which avenged it.  It was under William the Red that English soldiers shouted scorn at the Norman barons who surrendered at Rochester.  It was under Henry the First that an English army faced Duke Robert and his foreign knighthood when they landed for a fresh invasion, “not fearing the Normans.”  It was under the same great king that Englishmen conquered Normandy in turn on the field of Tenchebray.  This overthrow of the conquering baronage, this union of the conquered with the king, brought about the fusion of the conquerors in the general body of the English people.  As early as the days of Henry the Second the descendants of Norman and Englishman had become indistinguishable.  Both found a bond in a common English feeling and English patriotism, in a common hatred of the Angevin and Poitevin “foreigners” who streamed into England in the wake of Henry and his sons.  Both had profited by the stern discipline of the Norman rule.  The wretched reign of Stephen alone broke the long peace, a peace without parallel elsewhere, which in England stretched from the settlement of the Conquest to the return of John.  Of her