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 the birth of a new and greater nation. "It was in these years of subjection," says Green, "that England became really England." The Normans degraded the bulk of the English lords, but they made these displaced nobles the nucleus of a new middle class. At the same time their protection led to the elevation into the same middle class of a race of cultivators who had been peasants. Furthermore, the Norman rule expanded villages into towns and cities, and these in time began to stand, as powerful boroughs, for the rights of the people. The conquest, says Green, "secured for England a new communion with the artistic and intellectual life of the world without her. To it we owe not merely English wealth and English freedom, but England herself."

Edward A. Freeman calls the Norman conquest "the most important event in English history since the first coming of the English and their