Early in the morning he was awakened by the great cathedral bell.  “It is an hour of praise,” his attendant said to him, “when the priests give thanks for the new day.”  William lifted up his hands in prayer and expired.

125.  His Burial (1087).

His remains were taken for interment to St. Stephen’s church, which he had built in the city of Caen, Normandy.  As they were preparing to let down the body into the grave, a man suddenly stepped forward and forbade the burial.  William, he said, had taken the land, on which the church stood, from his father by violence.  He demanded payment.  The corpse was left on the bier, and inquiry instituted, and not until the debt was discharged was the body lowered to its last resting place.

“Thus,” says the old chronicle, “he who had been a powerful king, and the lord of so many territories, possessed not then of all his lands more than seven feet of earth,” and not even that unttil the cash was paid for it.  But William’s bones were not to rest when finally laid in the grave, for less than five centuries later (1532) the French Protestants dug them up and scattered them.

126.  Summary (1066-1087).

The results of the Norman Conquest may be thus summed up: 

1.  The Conquest was not the subjugation of the English by a different race, but rather a victory won for their advantage by a branch of their own race.[1] 2.  It found England a divided country (S71); it made it a united kingdom.  It also united England and Normandy (SS108, 191), and brought the new English kingdom into closer contact with the higher civilization of the Continent.  This introduced fresh intellectual stimulus, and gave to the Anglo-Saxon a more progressive spirit. 3.  It modified the English language by the influence of the Norman-French element, thus giving it greater flexibility, refinement, and elegance of expression. 4.  It substituted for the fragile and decaying structures of wood generally built by the Saxons, Norman castles, abbeys, and cathedrals of stone. 5.  It hastened influences, which were already at work, for the consolidation of the nation.  It developed and completed the feudal form of land tenure, but it made that tenure strictly subordinate to the Crown, and so freed it, in great measure, from the evils of Continental feudalism (SS86, 150). 6.  It reorganized the English Church and defined the relation of the Crown to that Church and to the Pope (S118). 7.  It abolished the four great earldoms (S64), which had been a constant source of weakness, danger, and division; it put an end to the Danish invasions; it brought the whole of England under a strong monarchical government, to which not only all the great nobles, but also their vassals or tenants, were compelled to swear allegiance (SS121, 122). 8.  It made no radical changes in the English laws, but enforced impartial obedience to them among all classes.[2]