Page:15 decisive battles of the world Vol 2 (London).djvu/11

Rh greater part of the lands of the English confiscated, and divided among aliens, the very name of Englishman turned into a reproach, the English language rejected as servile and barbarous, and all the high places in church and state for upwards of a century tilled exclusively by men of foreign race.

No less true than eloquent is Thierry's summing up of the social effects of the Norman conquest on the generation that witnessed it, and on many of their successors. He tells his reader that "if he would form a just idea of England conquered by William of Normandy, he must figure to himself—not a mere change of political rule—not the triumph of one candidate over another candidate—of the man of one party over the man of another party, but the intrusion of one people into the bosom of another people—the violent placing of one society over another society, which it came to destroy, and the scattered fragments of which it retained only as personal property, or (to use the words of an old act) as 'the clothing of the soil;' he must not picture to himself, on the one hand, William, a king and a despot—on the other, subjects of William's, high and low, rich and poor, all inhabiting England, and consequently all English: he must imagine two nations, of one of which William is a member and the chief—two nations 2