The middle class which was thus created was reinforced by the upgrowth of a corresponding class in our towns.  Commerce and trade were promoted by the justice and policy of the foreign kings; and with their advance rose the political importance of the trader.  The boroughs of England, which at the opening of this period were for the most part mere villages, were rich enough at its close to buy liberty from the Crown and to stand ready for the mightier part they were to play in the developement of our parliament.  The shame of conquest, the oppression of the conquerors, begot a moral and religious revival which raised religion into a living thing; while the close connexion with the Continent which foreign conquest brought about secured for England a new communion with the artistic and intellectual life of the world without her.

[Sidenote:  William the Conqueror]

In a word, it is to the stern discipline of our foreign kings that we owe not merely English wealth and English freedom but England herself.  And of these foreign masters the greatest was William of Normandy.  In William the wild impulses of the northman’s blood mingled strangely with the cool temper of the modern statesman.  As he was the last, so he was the most terrible outcome of the northern race.  The very spirit of the sea-robbers from whom he sprang seemed embodied in his gigantic form, his enormous strength, his savage countenance, his desperate bravery, the fury of his wrath, the ruthlessness of his revenge.  “No knight under heaven,” his enemies owned, “was William’s peer.”  Boy as he was at Val-es-dunes, horse and man went down before his lance.  All the fierce gaiety of his nature broke out in the warfare of his youth, in his rout of fifteen Angevins with but five men at his back, in his defiant ride over the ground which Geoffry Martel claimed from him, a ride with hawk on fist as if war and the chase were one.  No man could bend William’s bow.  His mace crashed its way through a ring of English warriors to the foot of the Standard.  He rose to his greatest height at moments when other men despaired.  His voice rang out as a trumpet when his soldiers fled before the English charge at Senlac, and his rally turned the flight into a means of victory.  In his winter march on Chester he strode afoot at the head of his fainting troops and helped with his own hand to clear a road through the snowdrifts.  And with the northman’s daring broke out the northman’s pitilessness.  When the townsmen of Alencon hung raw hides along their walls in scorn of the “tanner’s” grandson, William tore out his prisoners’ eyes, hewed off their hands and feet, and flung them into the town.  Hundreds of Hampshire men were driven from their homes to make him a hunting-ground and his harrying of Northumbria left Northern England a desolate waste.  Of men’s love or hate he recked little.  His grim look, his pride, his silence, his wild outbursts of passion, left William lonely even in his court.  His subjects