In the five hundred years that followed the landing of Hengest Britain had become England, and its conquest had ended in the settlement of its conquerors, in their conversion to Christianity, in the birth of a national literature, of an imperfect civilization, of a rough political order.  But through the whole of this earlier age every attempt to fuse the various tribes of conquerors into a single nation had failed.  The effort of Northumbria to extend her rule over all England had been foiled by the resistance of Mercia; that of Mercia by the resistance of Wessex.  Wessex herself, even under the guidance of great kings and statesmen, had no sooner reduced the country to a seeming unity than local independence rose again at the call of the Northmen.  The sense of a single England deepened with the pressure of the invaders; the monarchy of AElfred and his house broadened into an English kingdom; but still tribal jealousies battled with national unity.  Northumbrian lay apart from West-Saxon, Northman from Englishman.  A common national sympathy held the country roughly together, but a real national union had yet to come.  It came with foreign rule.  The rule of the Danish kings broke local jealousies as they had never been broken before, and bequeathed a new England to Godwine and the Confessor.  But Cnut was more Englishman than Northman, and his system of government was an English system.  The true foreign yoke was only felt when England saw its conqueror in William the Norman.

For nearly a century and a half, from the hour when William turned triumphant from the fens of Ely to the hour when John fled defeated from Norman shores, our story is one of foreign masters.  Kings from Normandy were followed by kings from Anjou.  But whether under Norman or Angevin Englishmen were a subject race, conquered and ruled by men of strange blood and of strange speech.  And yet it was in these years of subjection that England first became really England.  Provincial differences were finally crushed into national unity by the pressure of the stranger.  The firm government of her foreign kings secured the land a long and almost unbroken peace in which the new nation grew to a sense of its oneness, and this consciousness was strengthened by the political ability which in Henry the First gave it administrative order and in Henry the Second built up the fabric of its law.  New elements of social life were developed alike by the suffering and the prosperity of the times.  The wrong which had been done by the degradation of the free landowner into a feudal dependant was partially redressed by the degradation of the bulk of the English lords themselves into a middle class as they were pushed from their place by the foreign baronage who settled on English soil; and this social change was accompanied by a gradual enrichment and elevation of the class of servile and semi-servile cultivators which had lifted them at the close of this period into almost complete freedom.