Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/317

Rh EFFECTS ON LANGUAGE AND ART.] ENGLAND 301 One result of these changes in the art of fortification was largely to change the character of the warfare as well as the tactics of the age immediately following the Conquest. The older warfare of England is a warfare of pitched battles. Such is the warfare of /Elfred; such is the warfare of Brihtnoth and Ulfcytel and Eadmund Ironside. But the warfare of the twelfth century is mainly a warfare of sieges. The taking of towns and castles is endless ; but between Senlac and the wars of the thirteenth century we hardly meet with more than two great battles in the open field, those of Tinchebrai and the Standard. The changes in the character of warfare were accompanied by a more general change in the art of war. An ancient English army fought on foot ; the horse was used only to carry the warrior to the field. When the time for action came, the king or ealdorman and all his following dis mounted. The old national weapon was the sword, which under Cnut was exchanged for the heavy Danish axe. The English armies of the eleventh century consisted of two classes, both footmen. The housecarls, the paid force, and the thegns and other personal followers of the king, wore coats of mail and carried shields, which could be made into a kind of fortification called the shield-wall. They hurled jave lins at the beginning of the fight, and came to close conflict with the axe. The irregular levies of the shires came armed with axes, javelins, clubs, or any other weapons that they could bring. But there was no cavalry, and there were but few archers. In the Norman system of warfare, cavalry and archers are the chief arms. The mailed knights charge on horseback with long lances raised high in the air; they use the sword, and sometimes the iron mace, for close combat. The infantry are mainly archers ; the mounted archer is rare. With the Conquest the Norman tactics naturally dis placed the English. The Englishman grasped the weapon of his conqueror, and the fame of the English archers began. Yet the Norman manner of fighting was itself to some ex tent influenced by English practice. The English archer, though he had changed his weapon, was really the true heir of the English axeman. In the fourteenth century, as in the eleventh, the main strength of an English army lay in its infantry. And, earlier than this, the old traditions of English warfare were sometimes followed by the Normans themselves. More than once in wars of the twelfth cen tury we find kings and nobles getting down from their horses and fighting 011 foot, axe in hand, like Cnut or Harold. We can now sum up the main results of the Norman Con quest. We can be hardly wrong in calling it the most im portant event in English history since the first coming of the English and their conversion to Christianity. It was a great and a violent change, a change which, either in its immediate or in its more distant results, touched everything in the land. Yet there was no break, no gap, parting the times before it from the times after it. The changes which it wrought were to a great extent only the strengthening of tendencies which were already at work. The direct changes which we may look upon as forming the Conquest itself, as distinguished from its more distant results, were done at once gradually and under cover of legal form. No old institutions were uprooted, though some of them were undermined by new institutions set up alongside of them. The revolution which seemed to be the over throw of English freedom led in the end to its new birth. Under an unbroken succession of native, kings, freedom might have died out step by step, as it did in some other lands. As it was, the main effect of the Conquest was to call out the ancient English spirit in a more definite and antagonistic shape, to give the English nation new leaders in the conquerors who were gradually changed into country men, and, by the union of the men of both races, to win back the substance of the old institutions under new forms. Under the sons of the Conqueror England appears for Reign of the first time in her new European character. Looking w iU am at her simply as a power, without regard to the nationality of her inhabitants, she now appears as an insular power making conquests on continental ground. William Rufus, placed on the throne by the English people in opposition to a Norman revolt, broke all his promises of good govern ment, and ruled as one of the worst tyrants in our history. But it would be hard to show that he was an oppressor of Englishmen as Englishmen. His rule was rather a tyranny which pressed on all classes and all races, though the native English would doubtless be the class which felt it most bit terly. Godless and vicious beyond all parallel before or after, he was still a captain and a statesman, and no king better knew how to make use of every art to advance the power of his kingdom. He won a large part of Normandy by force of arms ; and, when his brother Robert set forth on the crusade, he obtained the whole duchy under cover of a mortgage Maine revolted and was won back ; a purchase of Aquitaine was negotiated ; Rufus was believed to have designs on the crown of France itself. A short war was waged between Rufus and Philip of France, a war Warwith which now begins to put on the character of a war between France. England and France, rather than that of a mere war between the duke of the Normans and his overlord at Paris. The wealth and strength of England now for the first time directly told in continental affairs. But the schemes of the Red King were cut short by the stroke of an arrow in the New Forest (2d August 1100). By an agreement between William and Robert, if either died childless, his brother was to succeed to his dominions. But at the death of Rufus, Robert was far away on the crusade, and the English nation had never paid much heed to any attempts to settle the succession of the crown before a vacancy. Henry, the youngest son of the Conqueror, the only one of his sons Election who was the son of a crowned king and born on English of ground, was unanimously chosen and speedily crowned. &quot; eDI T An Englishman by birth, if not by descent, he further married a wife who had some English blood in her veins, and who, in the eyes of his subjects, passed for an English woman. This was Edith, the daughter of Malcolm of Scotland, who at her marriage took the Norman name of Matilda. The English king and the English queen were mocked at by the Norman courtiers, who again conspired to bring in the Norman duke. Again a son of the Con queror owed his crown to English loyalty. A second Norman invasion of England followed. Robert landed at Portsmouth, as his father had landed at Pevensey, but the policy of Henry found means to send him and his host away without fighting (1101). One of the usual agree ments was made, an agreement which had little chance of being kept, by which again each brother was to succeed to the dominions of the other in case of the failure of direct heirs. But Robert was incapable of ruling his own dominions ; a party in Normandy invited the King of the English to save the duchy from anarchy. Two campaigns, His con- ending in the great fight of Tinchebrai (1106), brought quest of Normandy into the hands of Henry Men at the time looked on the day of Tinchebrai as the reversal of the day of Senlac. Normandy was conquered by England, as England had before been conquered by Normandy, Such a view put forth only one side of the case ; but from one side it was true. During the rest of Henry s reign there was perfect peace in England ; but nearly the whole time was filled with continental wars. The warfare between France and