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centralized, had lost much of their predatory and ferocious spirit. Long settled in England, they gradually became assimilated to the natives, whose laws and language were not radically different from their own. From these sea-wolves, who lived on the pillage of the world, the English will imbibe their maritime enterprise.

Norman.-The Normans, as we have seen, were a Scandinavian tribe with a changed nature,- Christianized, at least in the mediæval sense, and civilized. The peculiar quality of their genius was its suppleness. They intermarried with the French, borrowed the French language, adopted French customs, imitated French thought; and, in a hundred and fifty years after their settlement, were so far cultured as to consider their kinsmen, the Saxons, unlettered and rude.

Transferred to England, they become English. To these they were superior:

1. In refinement of manners. The Saxons,' says an old writer, vied with each other in their drinking feats, and wasted their income by day and night in feasting, whilst they lived in wretched hovels; the French and Normans, on the other hand, living inexpensively in their fine large houses, were, besides, refined in their food and studiously careful in their dress.'

2. In taste, the art of pleasing the eye, and expressing a thought by an outward representation. The Norman architecture, including the circular arch and the rose window with its elegant mouldings, made its appearance. You might see amongst them (the Saxons) churches in every village, and monasteries in the cities, towering on high, and built in a style unknown before.' They were to become the most skilful builders in Europe.

3. In weapons and warlike enterprise. They used the bow, fought on horseback, and were thus prepared for a more nimble and aggressive movement.

4. In intellectual culture. Five hundred and sixty-seven schools were established between the Conquest and the death of King John (1216). In poetry they were relatively cultivated. Another point of excellence was the intelligence of their clergy. The illiteracy of the Saxon was the excuse for banishing him from all valuable ecclesiastical dignities. The Norman bishops and abbots, who gradually supplanted him, were for the most

part of loftier minds than the mailed warriors who elevated them to wealth and authority.

Such were the points of superiority at which the Norman was prepared to contribute new impulses to the national character. In many respects, he was the reverse of the Saxon. In the movement of his intellect, he was prompt and spirited rather than profound. Like the Parisian, he was polite, elegant, graceful, talkative, dainty, superficial. Beauty pleased rather than exalted him. Nature was pretty rather than grand-never mystical. Love was a pastime rather than a devotion. Woman impressed him less by any spiritual transcendence than by a vastly becoming smile,' a 'sweet and perfumed breath,' a form 'white as new-fallen snow on a branch.' To show skill and courage for the meed of glory, to win the applause of the ladies, to display magnificence of dress and armor,—such was his desire and study. Here is a picture of the fancies and splendors in which he delights and loses himself. A king, wishing to console his afflicted daughter, proposes to take her to the chase in the following style:

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Ye shall have revel, dance, and song;

Little children, great and small,
Shall sing as does the nightingale. . .
A hundred knights, truly told,

Shall play with bowls in alleys cold,
Your disease to drive away. . . .

Forty torches burning bright

At your bridge to bring you light,
Into your chamber they shall you bring
With much mirth and more liking.

Your blankets shall be of fustian,

Your sheets shall be of cloth of Rennes.
Your head sheet shall be of pery pight,
With diamonds set and rubies bright.

When you are laid in bed so soft,

A cage of gold shall hang aloft,

With long paper fair burning,
And cloves that be sweet-smelling,

Frankincense and olibanum,

That when ye sleep the taste may come;
And if ye no rest can take,

All night minstrels for you shall wake.'

What will come of this gallantry, splendor, and pride, when the brilliant flower is engrafted on the homely Saxon stock?

Anglo-Saxon.-Starting from the same Aryan homestead, with the same stock of ideas, with the same manners and customs, the Teuton takes his westward course, and settles chiefly in Germany,

'She of the Danube and the Northern Sea.'

After centuries of separation, these two kindred meet in mistenveloped Britain. But climate, soil, and time have changed their characters and speech. They have forgotten their mutual relationship, and meet like the lion whelps of a common lairas foes. The Teutonic stream,-that, too, diverged. Into the mud and slime of Holland, into the forests and fens of Denmark, up into the snow-capped mountains of Sweden and Norway, across the surging main into volcanic Iceland, it branched. Danish, Norse, and Saxon, with superficial distinctions-as of Heathen and Christian, or the like- are at bottom one, Teutonic or Germanic. Inland, in the south, away from the sea, was the great division of the High-Germans; near the sea, by the mouths of the Rhine and Elbe, that of the Low-Germans, in whom we have the deeper interest. To these latter belonged the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, whose language, closely resembling modern Dutch, is the plantlet of English. These tribes, known abroad as Saxons,' early spoken of by themselves as Angles or English, have in the more careful historic use of the present been designated as Anglo-Saxons.

The orders of society were the bond and the free. Men became serfs, or slaves, either by capture in battle or by the sentence of outraged law. Over them their master had the power of life and death. He was responsible for them as for his cattle. Rank was revered, and the freemen were divided into earls and ceorls, or Earls and Churls.

1 So called from a short crooked sword, called a seax, carried by the warriors under their loose garments. Thus, Hengist, the Jute, invited to a banquet, instructed his companions to conceal their short swords beneath their garments. At a given signal-Nimed eure Seaxes, Draw your swords!'-the weapons were plunged into the hearts of their British entertainers.

The basis of society was the possession of land. The free land-holder was 'the free-necked man,' whose long hair floated over a neck that had never bent to a lord. He was 'the weaponed man,' who alone bore spear and sword. A nation of farmers, as they had been in the Sunny East, as they are to-day. He might not be a tiller of the soil, but he must acquire it if he would be esteemed. The landless one could hope for no distinction.

Accord

The social form was determined by the blood-bond. ing to kinship, men were grouped into companies of ten, called a tithing. Every ten tithings was called a hundred; and several hundreds, a shire. Each kinsman was his kinsman's keeper. Every crime was held to have been committed by all who were related to the doer of it, and against all who were related to the sufferer. From this sense of the value of the family tie sprung the rudiments of English justice. So strong is it, that his kinsfolk are the sole judges of the accused, for by their oath of his innocence or guilt he stands or falls. In their British home these judges will be a fixed number-the germ of the jury system. Other methods of appeal there are, the duel and the ordeal. The first pleases the savage nature. Besides, is not the issue in the hand of God, and will not he award the victory to the just? This practice will be revived in Normandy, introduced by the Conqueror into England, appealed to in 1631, and abolished only in 1817. The second inspires confidence; for fire and water are deities, and surely the gods will not harm the innocent or screen the guilty? Therefore, be ready to lift masses of red-hot iron in your hands, or to pass through flame.

They hate cities. Then, as now, they must have independence and free air. Their villages are knots of farms. They live apart," says Tacitus, each by himself, as woodside, plain, or fresh spring attracts him.' Each settlement must be isolated from its fellows. Each is jealously begirt by a belt of forest or fen, which parts it from neighboring communities,- a ring of common ground which none may take for his own, but which serves as the Golgotha where traitors and deserters meet their doom. This, it is said, is the special dwelling-place of the nix and the will-o'-the-wisp. Let none cross this death-line except he blow his horn; else he will be taken for a foe, and any man may lawfully slay him.

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Around some moot-hill or sacred tree the whole community meet to administer justice and to legislate. Here the field is passed from seller to buyer by the delivery of a turf cut from its soil. Here the aggrieved may present his grievance. The elder men' state the 'customs,' and the evil-doer is sentenced to make pecuniary reparation. Eye for eye,' life for life, or for each fair damages, is the yet unwritten code. The body and its members have each their legal price. Only treason, desertion, and poison involve capital punishment, and sentence is pronounced by the priest. Here, too, the king of the tribe-chosen from among the ablest of its chiefs-and the Witan, the Wise Men, who limit his jurisdiction, convene to settle questions of peace and war, or to transact other important affairs. The warriors, met in arms, express their approval by rattling their armor, their dissent by murmurs. Later, this assembly will be known as the Parliament of a great empire. Among the nobility, there is one who is the king's chosen confidant, the 'knower of secrets,' the 'counsellor.' In after times he will be known as the Prime Minister.

Knowledge was transmitted less by writing than by oral tradition, and almost wholly in the form of verse. There was a perpetual order of men, like the rhapsodists of ancient Greece and the bards of the Celtic tribes, who were at once poets and historians; whose exclusive employment it was to learn and repeat; wandering minstrels they were, travelling about from land to land, chanting to the people the fortunes of the latest battle or the exploits of their ancestors, a delightful link of union, loved and revered. The honors bestowed upon them were natural to an age in which reading and writing were mysteries. On arms, trinkets, amulets, and utensils, sometimes on the bark of trees, and on wooden tablets, for the purpose of memorials or of epistolary correspondence, were engraven certain wonderful characters called runes. By their potent spells, some runes, it was believed, could lull the tempest, stop the vessel in her course, divert the arrow in its flight, arrest the career of witches through the air, cause love or hatred, raise the dead, and extort from them the secrets of the spirit-world. Thus says the heroine of a Northern

romance:

'Like a Virgin of the Shield I roved o'er the sea,
My arm was victorious, my valor was free;
By prowess, by runic enchantment and song,

I raised up the weak, and I beat down the strong.'

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