Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/184

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was over also. Englishmen and Normans had, for the last time under those names, met in open fight on English soil. Whether of the two had won the victory? Such a question might admit of different answers when the Norman King vanquished the Norman nobility at the head of the English people. In one sense the Conquest was confirmed; in another sense it was undone. Men must have felt that the Conquest was undone, that the wergeld of those who fell two-and-twenty years back was indeed paid, when the second Norman host that strove to land on the beach of Pevensey, instead of marching on to Hastings, to Senlac, to London, and to York, was beaten back from the English coast by the arms of Englishmen. They must have felt that it was undone, when the castles on which Englishmen looked as the darkest badges of bondage were stormed by an English host, gathered together at the same bidding which had gathered men together to fight at Sherstone and at Stamfordbridge. He must have been Nithing indeed who did not feel that the wrongs of many days were paid for, when the arch-oppressor, the most loathed of all his race, came forth with downcast looks to meet the jeers and curses of the nation on which he had trampled. Days like the day of Tunbridge, the day of Pevensey, and the day of Rochester, are among the days which make the heart of a nation swell higher for their memory. They were days on which the Englishman overcame the Norman, days which ruled that he who would reign over England must reign with the good will of the English people. The fusion of Normans and English was as yet far from being brought to perfection; indeed nothing could show more clearly than those days that the gap between the two nations still yawned in all its fulness. But nothing did more than the work of those days at once to fill up the gap and to rule in what