Perhaps it ought to have been so. Perhaps by no other method could
England, and, with England, Scotland, and in due time Ireland, have become
partakers of that classic civilization and learning, the fount whereof,
for good and for evil, was Rome and the Pope of Rome: but the method was
at least wicked; the actors in it tyrannous, brutal, treacherous,
hypocritical; and the conquest of England by William will remain to the
end of time a mighty crime, abetted--one may almost say made possible, as
too many such crimes have been before and since--by the intriguing
ambition of the Pope of Rome.
Against that tyranny the free men of the Danelagh and of Northumbria rose.
If Edward, the descendant of Cerdic, had been little to them, William, the
descendant of Rollo, was still less. That French-speaking knights should
expel them from their homes, French-chanting monks from their convents,
because Edward had promised the crown of England to William, his foreign
cousin, or because Harold Godwinsson of Wessex had sworn on the relics of
all the saints to be William's man, was contrary to their common-sense of
right and reason.
So they rose and fought: too late, it may be, and without unity or
purpose; and they were worsted by an enemy who had both unity and purpose;
whom superstition, greed, and feudal discipline kept together, at least in
England, in one compact body of unscrupulous and terrible confederates.
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