Page:15 decisive battles of the world Vol 2 (London).djvu/13

Rh ceased to keep aloof from each other; the one in haughty scorn, the other in sullen abhorrence; and when all the free men of the land, whether barons, knights, yeomen, or burghers, combined to lay the foundations of English freedom. Our Norman barons were the chiefs of that primary constitutional movement; those "iron Barons,"" whom Chatham has so nobly eulogised. This alone should make England remember her obligations to the Norman Conquest, which planted far and wide, as a dominant class in her land, a martial nobility of the bravest and most energetic race that ever existed. It may sound paradoxical, but it is in reality no exaggeration to say, with Guizot, that England's liberties are owing to her having been conquered by the Normans. It is true that the Saxon institutions were the primitive cradle of English liberty, but by their own intrinsic force they could never have founded the enduring free English constitution. It was the Conquest that infused into them a new virtue, and the political liberties of England arose from the situation in which the Anglo-Saxon and the Anglo-Norman populations and laws found themselves placed relatively to each other in this island. The state of England under