"Norman Conquest" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... England during the Middle Ages; Comprising the Reigns from the Norman Conquest to the Accession of Henry VIII. 4 vols. ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... before the Norman Conquest there was a great intercourse between England and France, and many settlers from the latter country came over here. This, by the way, may account for that gradual change of the Anglo-Saxon language mentioned as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... remains to be explained how the inhabitants of the Scottish Lowlands, outside Lothian, can be included among the English of Lothian who resisted Edward I. That explanation is afforded by the events which followed the Norman Conquest of England. It is argued that the Englishmen who fled from the Normans united with the original English of Lothian to produce the result indicated in the passage quoted from Mr. Green. The farmers of Fife and the Lowlands, the artisans of the towns, the dwellers ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... arts of peace. But his successors failed to sustain the institutions he planted. He is said to have shone with the lustre of the brightest day of summer amidst the gloom of a long, dark, and stormy, winter. Before the Norman conquest the Anglo-Saxon tongue fell into disrepute; and French teachers and French manners were affected ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... predilections were the governing factors of any opinion which is expressed. John Milton, in his brave attempt to tell the story of early England, does not so much as allude to these disagreeable points. Hume disdainfully passes by the whole subject and practically begins with the Norman conquest. Lappenberg says of the group marriage of the Britons that it "is probably a mere Roman fable."[163] Innes accepts the views of the classical authorities and argues from them in his own peculiar way,[164] but Sullivan will have it that the materials afforded from classical sources are worthless: ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... child possessed none of the accomplishments of her age. She could not play on the piano; she could not speak French well; she could not tell you when gunpowder was invented: she had not the faintest idea of the date of the Norman Conquest, or whether the earth went round the sun, or vice versa. She did not know the number of counties in England, Scotland, and Wales, let alone Ireland; she did not know the difference between latitude and longitude. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... has been no lack of such research in regard to insignificant individuals who have been accidentally connected with events which come within the cognizance of English historians; but the greatest Englishman among all English politicians and statesmen since the Norman Conquest has heretofore been honored with no biographer who considered him worthy the labor which has been lavished on inferior men. The readers of Macaulay's four volumes of English history have often expressed their amazement at his minute knowledge of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... territorial and official:[*] he exercised jurisdiction within his county: he levied the third of the fines to his own profit: he was at once a civil and a military magistrate: and though his authority, from the time of the Norman conquest, was hereditary in England, the title was so much connected with the office, that where the king intended to create a new earl, he had no other expedient than to erect a certain territory into a county or earldom, and to bestow ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... conquered the Norman, and the foreign invaders became an integral portion of the people they had overcome. For the historical details of the story, I have only had to go to Freeman's magnificent History of the Norman Conquest of England, which I hope will be perused by all of my readers who are ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... the Norsemen runs thus. Towards the end of the ninth century, or nearly two hundred years before the Norman conquest, there was a great exodus or outswarming of the Norsemen from their original home in Norway. A certain King Harold had succeeded in making himself supreme in Norway, and great numbers of the lesser ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... private vices are of the last consequence to individuals, both here and hereafter; but private virtues never saved, private vices never ruined a nation. Edward the Confessor was a saint, and yet be prepared the way for the Norman conquest of England; and France owes infinitely less to St. Louis than to Louis XI., Richelieu, and Napoleon, who, though no saints, were statesmen. What is specially needed in statesmen is public spirit, ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... Norman Conquest, French became the literary language of England, and modern romance was born. Romance cycles on "the matter of France" or Legends of Charlemagne, and on "the matter of Britain" or Legends of Arthur, became popular, and Geoffrey of Monmouth freely ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... instruments, blown up with gunpowder; you may see the marks of the blast against the new tower here. Never was such a plunder. The whole face of the country for a century was that of a land recently invaded by a ruthless enemy; it was worse than the Norman conquest; nor has England ever lost this character of ravage. I don't know whether the union workhouses will remove it. They are building something for the people at last. After an experiment of three centuries, your gaols being full, and your ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... the above, as regards coins current in the Channel Islands prior to the Norman conquest of England, would clearly be that, subsequent to the circulation of the first uninscribed Gaulish coins as imitated from the Phillippus types, there followed the well-struck Roman issues, which, in course of time, were superseded ...
— The Coinages of the Channel Islands • B. Lowsley
... deep good sense and prudence which are a part of her character. And here we may just explain that the Crown revenues are derived from the property which has always been the appanage of the English sovereign from the Norman Conquest. For a long time past the custom has been to give this up to the country, with the understanding that it cannot be alienated, and to accept, in lieu thereof, a parliamentary grant of income. This Crown property is of immense value. It includes a large strip of the best part ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... kind; and whereas it would have been vain and ambitious in me to lift my eyes so high, in view of matrimonial proposals, as to nearly the topmost branch in the peerage of England, (the Earls Fitzoswald being known to have been barons of renown at the period of the Norman Conquest;) still it would ill have become me to prevent my daughter from gathering golden apples if they fell at her feet, because they had grown on such a lofty bough of the tree; and I will therefore confess, that it was with no little gratification I saw the unfoldings ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... immigrants as a progenitor of many descendants—the claim of descent becomes really a joke. If 24 generations have elapsed between the present and the time of William the Conqueror, every individual living to-day must have had living in the epoch of the Norman conquest not less than sixteen million ancestors. Of course, there was no such number of people in all England and Normandy, at that time, hence it is obvious that the theoretical number has been greatly reduced in every generation ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... was an evening bell which originally warned people to cover their fires, put out their lights, and go to bed. It was instituted in England after the Norman Conquest. The word comes from the French couvrir ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... exhibit a great variety of pleasing objects, and also numerous curiosities; among others, a mill that was in being before the Norman conquest, it being mentioned in doomsday book. There is also Guy's well, where this renowned champion was accustomed to slake his thirst, which is described by Leland as follows, it still remaining in the same state as it was then—"The silver wells in the meadows were enclosed with pure ...
— A Description of Modern Birmingham • Charles Pye
... of expression, its comprehensiveness, its plastic adaptability to new conditions and ideas, are largely the result of additions from other languages, and especially of its gradual absorption of the French language after the Norman Conquest. It is this dual character, this combination of native and foreign, of innate and exotic elements, which accounts for the wealth of our English language and literature. To see it in concrete form, we should read in succession Beowulf and Paradise ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... is of the consistency of tar; but he will always answer questions, with an incredible patience and sympathy, correcting one's mistakes in a genial and tentative way, as if a matter admitted of many opinions. If a man, for instance, maintains that the Norman Conquest took place in 1066 B.C., he will say that some historians put it more than two thousand years later, but that of course it is difficult to arrive at exact accuracy in these matters. Thus one never feels snubbed or ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... establishment continued to flourish. But the troublous times that followed the Norman conquest did not leave Burgh undamaged. It plays a considerable part in the story of Hereward, the Saxon patriot. Situated on the direct line between Bourne, his paternal inheritance, and the Camp of Refuge near ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... age of literature, where we should look in vain for prose or dramatic poetry; as in that country we never meet with real elegiac poetry before the end of the eighth century, nor with iambics before the same date; as even in more modern times rhymed heroic poetry appears in England with the Norman conquest, and in Germany the Minnesaenger rise and set with the Swabian dynasty—so, only in a much more decided manner, we see in the ancient and spontaneous literature of India, an age of poets followed by an age of collectors and imitators, that age to be succeeded by an age ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... obvious to him that the position of heir there was one which would exactly have suited his tastes and temperament. He was extremely pleased to belong to the family—and it was, indeed, a very exceptional family as regards history: it had been represented in nearly every catastrophe since the Norman Conquest, and always on the winning side, except once—but it was difficult to enjoy the distinction as it deserved, living, as he did, in a flat in London all by himself. When his name was mentioned to a well-informed ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... finds its right level. It began with what we may call the "Bible of History" idea: that all affairs and politics were a clouded but unbroken revelation of the divine. Thus any enormous and unaltered human settlement—as the Norman Conquest or the secession of America—we must suppose to be the will of God. It lent itself to picturesque treatment; and Carlyle and the Carlyleans were above all things picturesque. It gave them at first a rhetorical advantage over the Catholic and other older schools. They could boast ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... a specimen of the language which was in use among the nobility of England, in the ages immediately after the Norman conquest. The following is a specimen of the English that existed at the same time, among the common people. Robert de Brunne, speaking of his Latin ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... of Britain may have numbered at the Roman Conquest is, again, purely a matter of guess-work. But it may well have been not very different in amount from what it was at the Norman Conquest, when the entries in Domesday roughly show that the whole of England (south of the Humber) was inhabited about as thickly as the Lake District at the present day, and contained some two million ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... The Norman conquest of England, in the 11th century, made a break in the natural growth of the English language and literature. The old English or Anglo-Saxon had been a purely Germanic speech, with a complicated grammar and a full set of inflections. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... to have been divided. In the course of time the status of the ceorl was probably reduced; but although his political power was never large, and in some directions his freedom was restricted, it hardly seems possible previous to the Norman Conquest to class him among the unfree. Some authorities, however, accept this view. At all events it is certain that the ceorl was frequently a holder of land, and a person of some position, and that he could attain the rank of a thegn. Except in Kent his wergild ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... winds. Mr Rowe quotes from a 'botanical writer,' who examined some of them: 'The bole of this tree was about three feet high, and its total height to the topmost branches fifteen feet. The circumference of the trunk was six feet, and its prime must have been about the date of the Norman Conquest.' Some of the boughs, like the trunks, are immensely thick for the height of the trees, and they are covered with very deep cushions of bright green moss and hangings of polypody, and whortleberries grow upon them. Every step between the trees is perilous, among the uneven crowded ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... founders of such monarchies, arrant Draw-can-sirs, and forget they had any officers and soldiers that fought on their side in the battles they won, or assisted them in the subduing, or shared in possessing, the countries they mastered. We are told by some, that the English monarchy is founded in the Norman conquest, and that our princes have thereby a title to absolute dominion: which if it were true, (as by the history it appears otherwise) and that William had a right to make war on this island; yet his dominion by conquest ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke
... from the Laws, Charters, and Chronicles proved to be for me almost as pleasant as a volume of poetry. To my astonishment Magna Charta and the Dialogus de Scaccario were thoroughly good reading. The answer to "Quod est murdrum" was a thrilling revelation of what the Norman Conquest was and was not. I understood; and what is more delightful than that? There were even good courses, I found, in such apparently univiting a feast as "The Constitutions of Clarendon." I shall not easily forget my pleasure in discovering that the quotation "Nollumus leges Angliaemutari" ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... now published contains sketches written at different times from 1861 to 1891. It will be seen that they all bear more or less directly on the great central work of the historian's life, the history of the Norman Conquest. In his travels he went always to learn, and when he had learned he could not help teaching. The course of each of these journeys can be traced in his own letters as published in the Life. In 1856 he made his first foreign excursion—to Aquitaine—and after 1860 a foreign tour was ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... ENGLAND and WALES: an Historical and Descriptive Sketch of the various classes of Monumental Memorials which have been in use in this country from about the time of the Norman Conquest. Profusely illustrated with Wood Engravings. Part I. price 7s. 6d.; ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... among the first lords of the manor in Colonial Virginia, and they claimed descent from a ducal house whose patent of nobility dated back to the first months of the Norman Conquest of England. ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... after the Norman Conquest, the great abbey churches and cathedrals represent the work of a foreign architectural school, gradually acclimatising itself in England; while, on the other hand, the parish church continued to be planned ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... of the ambitious and capable power which destroyed them. Their fate may fill us with pity and our admiration for those who fought in a losing cause may prejudice us against their enslavers. But just as the Norman Conquest in the long run brought more blessing than misery, so the downfall of the Greek commonwealths was the first step to the conquering progress of the Greek type of civilisation through the whole world. Our Harold, fighting manfully yet vainly against an irresistible ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... After the Norman Conquest, when most of the houses in the town had been destroyed, there began to be a certain severe dignity rising up with the building of the forts and the castle by Robert D'Oily, who came over with King William. The fine and massive tower, with a swiftly flowing branch ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... of their own age, or the nineteenth-century development of the Empire. At that time a national schoolboy destined to earn his living as a soldier or a sailor, or a tinker or a tailor, sometimes knew a little of the Saxon kings of England, or even a few dates connected with the Norman Conquest, and the fact that Henry VIII. had six wives. But he had never heard of the Reform Bill, and knew nothing whatever of the incorporation of India, ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... art and, taking their inspiration from the famous Bayeux Tapestry, attributed to Queen Matilda, they represented the story of the Norman Conquest. They had been ordered in the fourteenth century by the descendant of a man-at-arms in William the Conqueror's train; were executed by Jehan Gosset, a famous Arras weaver; and were discovered, five hundred years later, ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... bears the marks of an age subsequent to that of the choir, and was probably erected in the reign of Henry VI. It is in the most finished style of the florid Gothic, containing niches, canopies, pediments, and pinnacles, and decorated with the statues of all the sovereigns of England, from the Norman Conquest to Henry V. The statue of James I. stands in the niche which tradition assigns as that formerly occupied by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 356, Saturday, February 14, 1829 • Various
... law, as it then prevailed in England, was in a great measure composed of some remnants of the old Saxon customs, joined to the feudal institutions brought in at the Norman conquest. And it is here to be observed, that the constitutions of Magna Charta are by no means a renewal of the laws of St. Edward, or the ancient Saxon laws, as our historians and law-writers generally, though very groundlessly, assert. They bear no resemblance, in any particular, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... Romans Britain under the Saxons Conversion of the Saxons to Christianity Danish Invasions; The Normans The Norman Conquest Separation of England and Normandy Amalgamation of Races English Conquests on the Continent Wars of the Roses Extinction of Villenage Beneficial Operation of the Roman Catholic Religion The early English Polity often misrepresented, and why? Nature of the Limited Monarchies of the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... deep as ocean. From guardians they grew match-makers and rivals by proxy: uncle schemed to graft Lucy on to a stick called Talboys, that came in with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, known in pedigrees as "the Norman Conquest." Aunt, wife of a merchant of no Descent, except from a high stool, devoted her to Richard Hardie. An unlooked-for obstacle encountered both: Lucy was not amorous. She loved these two egotists and their quadrupeds; but there she stopped dead short. They persisted; and, while they ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... slices of roasted meat cut from the chine, as told in the Homeric poems, and everywhere in Europe after the neolithic or polished-stone period, meat was a main article of diet, in conjunction with the vegetable products of agriculture. In this country, after the Norman conquest, meat-eating was greatly favoured by the important industry which grew up in hides. The land was well suited for the pasturage of cattle, and owing to the smallness of the population and the abundance ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... sometime after, by Henry II. But while the Conquest was for a season fatal to liberty, it was from the first favourable to every species of literature, art, and poetry. 'The influence,' says Campbell, 'of the Norman Conquest upon the language of England was like that of a great inundation, which at first buries the face of the landscape under its waters, but which, at last subsiding, leaves behind it the elements of new beauty and fertility. Its first effect was to degrade ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... neighbourhood, maintained that the chapel was dedicated to S. Nicholas. Hence the late Canon Curtis, of the Crimean Memorial Church in Constantinople, believed that this was the church of SS. Nicholas and Augustine of Canterbury, founded by a Saxon noble who fled to Constantinople after the Norman conquest of England. What is certain is that in the seventeenth century the chapel was dedicated to the Theotokos. Du Cange mentions it under the name, ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... Government said that Lord Rosebery's amendment was the best he had heard yet. The Government accepted it at once. They were willing to make every concession. They would, if need be, reconsider the Norman Conquest. ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... tedious process of transition,—a blending, in a certain sense, with the Latinized and more polished tongue of their conquerors,—and that the result was the language which we now call English and are proud to claim as our own; that it was about three hundred years after the Norman Conquest, namely, in 1362, that this new tongue was officially recognized and authorized to be used in the courts at law throughout the land; and that about the same time Geoffrey Chaucer composed and wrote his first poems. We should learn, moreover, that, during the transition period ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... growing previous to the Norman Conquest. It fixes the boundary of a manor. Even in the reign of Stephen, it was known as the ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... my hair disporting in wavy ringlets over a majestic brow, till at the end of the second page I was Theodore Fitzhedingham, twenty-five years of age, with several grandfathers and grandmothers distinguished in history before the Norman conquest, and a clear rent-roll of forty thousand a-year. And yet, after all, it was my own individual self, Thomas Smith Sneezum—not, perhaps, exactly as I was at that moment—but as I had often and often ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... taken in 1832), the origin of them is stated to be involved in obscurity, although no doubt iron was manufactured in the neighbourhood as early as the time of the Romans, and coal was obtained in the reign of Edward III. Probably before, and certainly soon after, the Norman Conquest, the soil was vested in the Crown, and all the rights of a royal forest were in force. The persons by whom the mines were then worked could not have been, in the first instance, free tenants of the Crown. It is more likely that they were in a state ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... inauspicious, or disgraceful circumstances attending their union, might secretly augment the anxiety of the royal pair to dazzle and impose by the magnificence of their public appearance. Only once before, since the Norman conquest, had a king of England stooped from his dignity to elevate a private gentlewoman and a subject to a partnership of his bed and throne; and the bitter animosities between the queen's relations on one side, and the princes of the blood and great nobles on the other, which had ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... capability of the human mind to resist the introduction of knowledge." I wonder whether he knew of that other good saying of Lounsbury's about the historian Freeman's being, in his own person, a proof of the necessity of the Norman Conquest. He had, at all events, a just and high estimate of the merits of my brilliant colleague. "Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse!" But Roosevelt was not himself a humorist, and his writings give little evidence of his possession ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... seacoal was largely exported to the Continent, it had not yet come into general use in England. It is a question of much interest, when mineral coal was first employed in England for fuel. I can find no evidence that it was used as a combustible until more than a century after the Norman conquest. It has been said that it was known to the Anglo-Saxon population, but I am acquainted with no passage in the literature of that people which proves this. The dictionaries explain the Anglo-Saxon word grofa by sea-coal. ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... was that from time to time, and in different places on the farm and in the fields and in the country about, they saw and talked to some rather interesting people. One of these, for instance, was a Knight of the Norman Conquest, another a young Centurion of a Roman Legion stationed in England, another a builder and decorator of King Henry VII's time; and so on and so forth; as I have tried to explain in a book called ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... such a proof is entitled to little attention; and On studying the style of the whole, and its conformity with the more magnificent front of St. Georges de Bocherville, it would seem most reasonable to regard them both as of nearly the same aera, the time of the Norman Conquest. We may through them be enabled to fix the date to a specimen of ancient architecture in our own country, more splendid than these, the Church of Castle Rising, whose west front is so much on the same plan, that ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... Prince of Wales, who bears among many titles that of Earl of Chester. But this is about the only modern attraction this interesting city possesses. At an angle of the walls are the "Dee Mills," as old as the Norman Conquest, and famous in song as the place where the "jolly miller once lived on the Dee." Full of attractions within and without, it is difficult to tear one's self away from this quaint city, and therefore we will agree, at least in one sense, with Dr. Johnson's blunt remark to a lady friend: ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... One of these was the collection of materials for a Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, or Latin Dictionary, which he hoped some time to complete. Another was the composition of a History of England, or History of Britain, from the earliest times to the Norman Conquest:—nay, though that was the form it ultimately took, the original project was nothing less than Hume anticipated, or a complete History of England, brought down in a continuous thread from the remotest origins of the nation to Milton's own time. ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... this forest is best seen, I mean as to the antiquity of it, by the merry grant of it from Edward the Confessor before the Norman Conquest to Randolph Peperking, one of his favourites, who was after called Peverell, and whose name remains still in several villages in this county; as particularly that of Hatfield Peverell, in the road from Chelmsford to Witham, which is supposed to be originally ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... period, too, we have all reason to believe, the country was much more advanced in improvement, than it had been about a century before, towards the close of the dissensions between the houses of York and Lancaster. Even then it was, probably, in a better condition than it had been at the Norman conquest: and at the Norman conquest, than during the confusion of the Saxon heptarchy. Even at this early period, it was certainly a more improved country than at the invasion of Julius Caesar, when its inhabitants were nearly in the same state with the ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... been formed upon the dialect of Mercia, that of the Midland Counties; and it cannot be too strongly impressed upon strangers who may be inclined to scoff at West Country expressions as inaccurate and vulgar, that before the Norman Conquest our language was that of the Court, and but for the seat of Government having been fixed in London might be so still; that it was highly cultivated, while the Midland Counties contributed nothing to literature, and the Northern were devastated with war; and that the dialect ...
— A Glossary of Provincial Words & Phrases in use in Somersetshire • Wadham Pigott Williams
... thus introduced from the Norse of Scandinavia into the French of Normandy, might, by the Norman Conquest of England, be carried further, and so find their way into ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... of terror to humanity. To say nothing of examples in the earlier periods, comets in the tenth century especially increased the distress of all Europe. In the middle of the eleventh century a comet was thought to accompany the death of Edward the Confessor and to presage the Norman conquest; the traveller in France to-day may see this belief as it was then ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... in rafts, damming the waters back upon the land. Streams, bewildered in the flats, changed their channels, mingling silt and sand with the peat moss. Nature, left to herself, ran into wild riot and chaos more and more, till the whole fen became one "Dismal Swamp," in which, at the time of the Norman Conquest, the "Last of the English," like Dred in Mrs. Stowe's tale, took refuge from their tyrants, and lived, like him, a free and ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... time it takes for the rays from many of them to reach our globe. Suppose, for instance, we see a sudden change in the light of any of these remote stars, we are inclined to ask ourselves when that change did actually occur. Was it in the days of Queen Elizabeth, or at the time of the Norman Conquest; or was it when Rome was at the height of her glory, or perhaps ages before that when the Pyramids of Egypt were being built? Even the last of these suppositions cannot be treated lightly. We have indeed no real knowledge of the distance from us of ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... let us say, a million miles a second, he would (if we can overlook the dispersion of the rays of light) overtake in succession the light that fell on the French Revolution, the Reformation, the Norman Conquest, and the faces of the ancient empires. He would read, in reverse order, the living history of man and whatever lay before the coming ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... origin of Anglo-Saxon law, as we understand it, and for representative government, and for the origin of Parliament. I doubt if there was any giving of new law, anything that we should call legislation, made by the English Parliament, then called the Witenagemot, before the Norman Conquest. I have never been able to find any. You find occasional announcements that the men of Kent "shall have their liberties as they used to," and perhaps there will be a statement of what those liberties were, in brief; but it is always clearly meant that they are ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... Saxon Chronicle,[1] King Alfred "restored" London in 886, and rebuilt the city wall, where it had become ruinous, upon the line of the ancient Roman one; and, until the Norman Conquest, it seems to have remained practically unaltered, nor does it appear to have been damaged by the various Danish attacks in 994, 1009, and 1016,[2] though frequently repaired afterwards during the Middle Ages. Without the wall was a wide and deep ditch, while between the ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... of all the lands in England; every estate in land being holden, immediately or mediately, of the crown. This doctrine was settled shortly after the Norman Conquest, and is still an axiom ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 231, April 1, 1854 • Various
... other tribes and groups until it was universally used. It is interesting to note how many thousands of years this must have been the chief weapon for destroying animals or crippling game at a distance. Even as late as the Norman conquest, the bow-and-arrow was the chief means of defense of the Anglo-Saxon yeoman, and for many previous centuries in the historic period had been the chief implement in warfare and in the chase. The use of the spear in fishing supplemented that of the hook, and is found among all ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Sharon Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons; Knight's Old England; Hume's History of England; Green's Conquest of England; Thierry's History of the Conquest of England by the Normans; Freeman's History of the Norman Conquest. ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... which (as is well known) represent the principal events in the Norman Conquest, are arranged in fifty-eight groups. The legend of the first ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... an American is ancient history, to an Englishman is an affair of scarcely more than yesterday. As Goldwin Smith has said, the Revolution of 1776 is to an American what the Norman conquest is to an Englishman—the event on which to found a claim of ancestral distinction. More than seven hundred years divide these two events. With the Revolution, our history as a nation began; before that we were a group of colonies, each a part of the British Empire. We fought single-handed ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... history this situation gave rise to a new form of jurisprudence called equity. Equity is that legal system which supplements common and statute law by aiming to secure justice where a strict application of law would work an injustice. Equity developed in England after the Norman Conquest, and, like the common law, was transferred to this country in colonial times. A distinct set of chancery or equity courts was created to administer equity in early America, but at present equity is administered by the same judges that preside ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... wisdom, blended two Civilizations, had at the right moment curbed the destructive element in feudalism, and had secured to the Englishman free access to the surface for all time. Thus the old English freedom was in fact restored by the Norman Conquest, by direct act ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... was taxed, but to the head of the armed invaders, who stood ready to enforce the payment. The Constitution of England embodies this very principle even now, in the twentieth century. Two of the three Estates,—King, Lords and Commons,—in whom the law-making power is vested, represent the Norman conquest, while even the third, still called the Lower House, boasts of being "an assembly of gentlemen," that is, of those who possess the right of private taxation of land, the right to claim a share of the cattle and crops of the whole country ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... as has been already pointed out, enough traces of Saxon—that is to say, Primitive Romanesque—architecture remain to show that many simple, though comparatively rude, buildings must have been erected previous to the Norman Conquest. Traces exist also of an influence which the rapid advance that had been made by the art of building as practised in Normandy was exerting in our island. The buildings at Westminster Abbey raised by Edward the Confessor, though they have been ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... from each for microscopic examination. They were declared to be, in each case, human in their origin, and to have belonged probably to fair-haired persons. These cases show flaying not to have been unknown in England, even, to judge by the Worcester case, after the Norman Conquest, and confirm the passages in records that seem to refer to ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... of popular fanaticism. [9] But, on the whole, their condition may sustain an advantageous comparison with that of any Christian people under the Mussulman dominion of later times, and affords a striking contrast with that of our Saxon ancestors after the Norman conquest, which suggests an obvious parallel in many of its circumstances ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... so intimately connected it with both real and imitative warfare, with the fierce life-and-death conflict of the battle-field, and with the scarcely less perilous struggle for honour and renown in the lists. Very soon after the Norman Conquest, in consequence of their presence being required to give validity to every species of legal document, SEALS became instruments of the greatest importance; and it was soon obvious that heraldic insignia, with a representation of the knightly shield upon which ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... Normans, originally pirates and plunderers, intermingled with the gentler inhabitants of France. When they turned their eyes to England they were already guardians of civilization. And we blandly record the Norman conquest of England as an unqualified benefit, as an impetus to social amenity, art, learning, architecture, and religion. Protests are useless. The earth abounds in instances of the spread of knowledge, inventions, culture, through war and subjugation. The "rude" peoples who ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... The Norman Conquest naturally suspended for a time all these privileges, and reduced all free towns to the level of burghs in demesne. Desirous, however, to secure the good will of the citizens, William hastened to assure them of his protection, and to confirm ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... social system which, from its early growth under the later Carlovingians in the ninth century, spread over Europe and reached its highest development in the twelfth century. At a time midway between these periods it was carried by the Norman Conquest into England. The history of this system of distinctly Frankish origin—a knowledge of which is absolutely essential to a proper understanding of history and the evolution of our present social system—is told by Stubbs with that discernment and thoroughness of analysis which have ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... the Conquest, and directly traceable to it through a long line of descent, though more slowly realized and for long in less striking forms, were in truth destined to produce results of greater permanence and a wider influence. The final result of the Norman Conquest was a constitutional creation, new in the history of the world. Nothing like this followed in the sphere of the Church. But for a generation or two the abundant vigour which flowed through the renewed religious life of Europe, and the radical changes which were necessary to bring England into ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... wave of Norse invasion swept over England at the Norman Conquest, and for a time submerged the native English population. The chivalrous Norman knights who followed William of Normandy's sacred banner, whether from religious zeal or desire of plunder, were as truly Vikings by race as were the Danes who settled in the Danelagh. The days when Rolf ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... tinged with Iberian, and who was followed by the Brython or Belgian. And, at some unknown date, we have to allow for the invasion of North Britain by another Germanic type, the Caledonian, which would seem to have been a Norse stock, foreshadowing the later Norman Conquest. And, as if this mish-mash was not confusion enough, came to make it worse confounded the Roman conquerors, trailing like a mantle of many colours the subject-races of ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... needed for recasting the ancient legend of Grim the fisher and his foster-son Havelok the Dane, it may be found in the fascination of the story itself, which made it one of the most popular legends in England from the time of the Norman conquest, at least, to that of Elizabeth. From the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries it seems to have been almost classic; and during that period two full metrical versions—-one in Norman-French and the other in ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... worthy man, and I am not sure that England owes quite all the things you name to the House of Commons. You see, my young friend, the growth of a nation like ours is slow, subject to many influences, and if you have read your history aright"—"Sir. I know it all—all! Norman Conquest, Magna Charta, Runnymede, Reformation, Tudors, Stuarts, Mr. Milton and Mr. Burke, and I have read something of Mr. Herbert Spencer and Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall,' Reynolds' Mysteries of the Court,'" and Pagett felt like one who had pulled the string ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... A Catalogue of the Nobility of England since the Norman Conquest, according to theire severall Creations by every particular King, with the arms handsomely emblazoned. This manuscript came into the possession of Sir Thomas Phillipps, and formed one of the lots at the sale of his collection in ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... architecture, and it was one of his distinctions to be the first historian to make extensive use in his subject of the evidences and illustrations supplied by the study of that art. His most famous and most elaborate work was his "History of the Norman Conquest" (1867-79), a monument which is likely long to remain the great authority on ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... days, when, spite of trouble and turmoil, he kept his heart brave, and true, and pure, and was in all things the real boy knight—in those fresh and generous days of youth, when, as Mr. Freeman, the brilliant historian of the Norman Conquest, says: "He shone forth before all men as the very ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... together, over and over again, the very jangle of it made it stick in my pupils' memory. Dates proved a great difficulty, yet a few dates, such as that of the Norman Conquest and of the Battle of Waterloo, were essential. "Clarke, can you remember the date of the Norman Conquest?" "Very sorry, sir; clean gone out of my 'ead." "Now, Daniels, how about the date of Waterloo?" "You've got me this time, sir." ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... of England in Verse, from the Norman Conquest to the reign of QUEEN VICTORIA; with an Appendix, comprising a summary of the leading events in each reign. Fcap. 8vo., with an Elegant Frontispiece. Price ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... under an alleged bequest of Edward the Confessor. The Manchus, though not invoking such artificial sanction, aspired to the dominion of China because their ancestors of the Golden Horde had ruled over the northern half of the empire. The Norman conquest, growing out of a family quarrel, was decided by a single battle. The Manchus' conquest of a country more than ten times the extent of Britain was not so easy to effect. Yet they achieved it with unexampled rapidity, because they came by invitation and they brought peace to a people ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... "Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England," or, as we should say, "Medicine, Herb Treatment, and Astrology." It forms a collection of documents never before published, illustrating the history of science in this country before the Norman Conquest.[2] It clearly appears that the Saxon leeches derived much of their knowledge directly from the Romans, and through them from the Greeks, but they also possessed a good deal of their own. The herbs they employed bespeak considerable acquaintance with ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... of the cross merely represents a hunting scene; and a Saxon bowman is shown shooting at some animals. The religious conceptions of an earlier and purer time have disappeared. The moustache of the sportsman also shows that the stone belonged to a period very near the Norman Conquest, when that fashion of wearing the hair was ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... the place is Aber Wye or the disemboguement of the Wye. The Saxons gave it the name of Chepstow, which in their language signifies a place where a market is held, because even in the time of the Britons it was the site of a great cheap or market. After the Norman Conquest it became the property of De Clare, one of William's followers, who built near it an enormous castle, which enjoyed considerable celebrity during several centuries from having been the birthplace of Strongbow, the conqueror of Ireland, but which is at present chiefly illustrious ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... Norman Conquest, which began in 1066, England was invaded by an army of ecclesiastics, and churches, monasteries, cathedrals, and abbeys were commenced in every part of the country. Naturally the Free-masons were much in demand, and some of them ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... proves that the poet himself came of "high parage," than the reverse is to be concluded from the nature of his coat-of-arms, which Speght thought must have been taken out of the 27th and 28th Propositions of the First Book of Euclid. Many a warrior of the Norman Conquest was known to his comrades only by the name of the trade which he had plied in some French or Flemish town, before he attached himself a volunteer to Duke William's holy and lucrative expedition; and it ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... kin, which is sometimes, to be sure, to be found in families that have no great-grandfathers, after they have been well-fed, well-read, and well-bred for a generation or two, but to which they had an uncommonly good right, as their pedigree—so I afterwards found—ran straight back to the Norman Conquest, without a single "probably" in it. They were, for their age, tall and slender, with yet more springy buoyancy than their aunt in pose and movement. Strangers were always mistaking them for each other. That day I could scarcely tell them apart, though afterwards I wondered at it. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... Thierry, the author of the 'History of the Norman Conquest,' affords an admirable contrast to that of Constant. His entire life presented a striking example of perseverance, diligence, self culture, and untiring devotion to knowledge. In the pursuit he lost his eyesight, lost his health, but never lost his love of truth. When so feeble that he was carried ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... description of Autumn in two lines, and one shilling for guessing correctly the missing letters in BR-STOL, SH-FFIELD, and H-LL. A lot of the competitors fell down on H-LL. I got six shillings for giving the dates of the Norman Conquest,—1492 A.D., and the Crimean War of 1870. In short, the thing was easy. I might say that to enter these competitions one has to have a certificate of age from a member of the clergy. But I ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... the fifth or sixth grade as an introduction to history study, and the romance "Robin Hood and the Merry Little Old Woman" may be used appropriately in any of these grades, especially if it is made to supplement a discussion of the Norman conquest. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... construction of the line, she found these difficulties occur so continually that she soon felt a more thorough disgust at this employment than at the preceding one. So the epic stopped short, some hundred years before the Norman conquest. Difficulty, which quickens the ardor of industry, always damps, and generally extinguishes, the false ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... a poem by a book-lover—or manuscript-lover, to be more exact—written by Ibn Faris Ar-Razi, the philologer, who died before the Norman Conquest, which a later Occidental can cheerfully accept and could not much improve upon: They asked me how I was. I answered: "Well, some things succeed and some fail; when my heart is filled with cares I say: 'One day perhaps they may be dispelled.' A cat is my companion; books, ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... ENGLAND OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST.—The most important and noteworthy result of the Norman Conquest of England, was the establishment in the island of a strong centralized government. England now for the first time became a ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... to describe accurately the impression made upon the mind of an American by his first visit to the House of Lords. What memories haunt him of the Norman Conquest and the Crusades, of Magna Charta and the King-Maker, of noblemen who suffered with Charles I. and supped with Charles II., and of noblemen still later whose family-pride looked down upon the House of Hanover, and whose banded political ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Merioneth. In the south the same policy was carried out. Alike in Gwynedd and in the vale of Towy, both in his castle building and in his town foundations, Edward was simply carrying on the traditions of earlier ages, and applying to his new lands those principles of government which, since the Norman Conquest, had become the tradition of the marcher lords. Even in his architectural schemes there was nothing novel in Edward's policy. Gilbert of Gloucester at Caerphilly, and Payne of Chaworth at Kidwelly, had already worked out the pattern of "concentric" defences that were to find their fullest ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... powerful curative or preventive attributes! Its seeds have been found in Egyptian tombs of the 21st dynasty. Many centuries later Pliny wrote that the best quality of seed still came to Italy from Egypt. Prior to the Norman conquest in 1066, the plant was well known in Great Britain, probably having been taken there by the early Roman conquerors. Before 1670 it was introduced into Massachusetts. During this long period of cultivation there seems to be no record or even indication of varieties. In many temperate ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... year 1670 our author published at London in 4to. his History of Britain, that part, especially, now called England, from the first traditional Beginning, continued to the Norman Conquest, collected out of the ancientest and best authors thereof. It is reprinted in the first volume of Dr. Kennet's compleat History of England. Mr. Toland in his Life of Milton, page 43, observes, that we have not ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... History was published in London more than fifty years ago. At the time when the first volume appeared, the subject of Anglo-Saxon antiquities had been nearly forgotten by the British public, although the most venerated laws, customs, and institutions of the nation originated before the Norman conquest. The Anglo-Saxon manuscripts lay unexamined in archives, and the important information they contained had never been made a part of general history. Mr. Turner undertook a careful and patient investigation of all the documents belonging to the period preserved in the kingdom, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... historian very appropriately names "The Old English:" it does not claim the merit of deep research, only of an earnest endeavour to be true to the facts, and in harmony with the tone, of the eventful period of "The Norman Conquest." ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... Hastings, and the great disaster of Senlac Hill occurred on October the 14th. This stone at Kirkdale is thus concerned with momentous events in English history, for the murder of Gamal and the insurrection of Tosti may be considered two of the links in the chain of events leading to the Norman Conquest. ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... a third picture to draw, and a great one,—that of the mighty and momentous conflict which ended in the death of the last of the Saxon kings, and the Norman conquest ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... frame. Selection exerts a most powerful influence in these cases. The rich and titled have so wide a range to choose from. Consider these things working through centuries, perhaps in a more or less direct manner, since the Norman Conquest. The fame of some such families for handsome features and well-proportioned frames is widely spread, so much so that a descendant not handsome is hardly regarded by the outside world as legitimate. But even with all these advantages ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... of feudalism, this manorial system, was not introduced into England by the Norman Conquest. It had grown up in the Saxon states, as it had on the continent, because of the prevalence there of the general social and economic conditions which favoured its growth. It was different from the continental system in some details; it used ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... sensible grievance of those aggrieved times were the Forest Laws. These oppressive enactments were the produce of the Norman Conquest, for the Saxon laws of the chase were mild and humane; while those of William, enthusiastically attached to the exercise and its rights, were to the last degree tyrannical. The formation of the New ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... remembered by students of early Italian history that Benevento and Spoleto joined the Church in her war upon the Lombard kingdom. Spoleto was broken up. Benevento survived as a Lombard duchy till the Norman Conquest. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... still so archaeological as to listen, many times each session, to Her Majesty, or Her Majesty's Commissioners, assenting to their bills, by pronouncing a sentence of old and obsolete Norman French—a memorial in its way of the Norman Conquest; and our State customs are so archaeological that, when Her Majesty, and a long line of her illustrious predecessors, have been crowned in Westminster Abbey, the old Scottish coronation-stone, carried off in A.D. 1296 by Edward I. from Scone, ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... followed the noble profession of arms for many generations. Nor were the De Lisles, his mother's family, less distinguished for the number of soldiers and sailors they had been giving to England ever since the Norman Conquest. Brock himself, when only twenty-nine, had commanded the 49th Foot in Holland under Sir John Moore, the future hero of Corunna, and Sir Ralph Abercromby, who was so soon to fall victorious in Egypt. Two years after this he had stood beside another and still greater man at Copenhagen, 'mighty Nelson,' ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... they gave little satisfaction (if any at all) in regard of the strangeness of their action. It was urged that the Commons were as justly due to the Lords as any other lands. They answered that these were Crown Lands where they digged, and the King who possessed them by the Norman Conquest being dead, they were returned again to the Common People of England, who might improve them if they would take the pains; that for those who would come dig with them, they should have the benefit equal with them, and eat of their bread; but they would not ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... signs of enchantment they did not dare to land, and returned to Spain, leaving the Islands of the Rediscovered to be visited as a convenient slave depot by merchants and pirates from the Peninsula till the Norman Conquest of ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... time to take shape enough to declare itself when it is again interrupted by troublous times, invasions, and wars, and changes of dynasty, and before any length of peace is again allowed, by the decisive and final blow of the Norman Conquest, which brought with it more than a change of dynasty. It changed the whole body of the governing and influential classes, not from one stratum to another within the Saxon nation, but by the introduction of a ruling class from another ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... or copper on one of the great stones, seven feet below the surface, strengthens the theory that Stonehenge was constructed by the race who used bronze implements and who were later known as Britons (S2). Consult Professor C. Oman's "England before the Norman Conquest"; see also R. W. Emerson's "English Traits," and O. W. Holmes's fine poem on the "Broken Circle," suggested by a visit ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... "That's what we could build when we were left to ourselves, an' this is what we can do afther sivin hundhred years of the Saxon." The ruins in question are the remains of fortifications erected after the Norman Conquest of Ireland by the Normans, a great entrance gate, and a strong, oblong keep. The ruins of the Dominican Friary, founded in 1241 by Meyler, of Birmingham, have a thrilling interest of their own, which has its pendant in the story of a Mayence verger, who holds ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... pure form, succeeded the language of the conquered. This was the case in the history of the Romance languages, which owe their present forms to the spread of Roman arms and culture. There was, as is well known, a similar development in the case of the English language. The Norman Conquest introduced, under the auspices of a socially superior and victorious group, a language culturally superior to the Anglo-Saxon. The latter was, of course, not entirely replaced, but profoundly modified, especially in the enrichment and ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... may be done partly in disquisitions, as in Michelet's "France"; but they must now be done in narrative; and nowhere, not even in Livy, is there a finer specimen of how all these things may be done by narrative than in Augustine Thierry's "Norman Conquest" and "Merovingian Scenes." The only danger to be avoided in dealing with so long a period in Thierry's way is the continuing to attach importance to a once great influence, when it has sunk to be an exceptive power. He who thinks it ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... meet Her Majesty the Queen at the Court of St. James without the slightest flutter of embarrassment, because I know I could trust her not to presume on my defencelessness to enter into conversation with me. But this duke, whose dukedom very likely dates back to the hour of the Norman Conquest, is a very different person, and is to be met under very different circumstances. He may ask me my politics. Of course I can tell him that I am a Mugwump, but what if he asks me ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... however compounded or from whatever fountains derived, had subsisted immemorially in this kingdom; and, though somewhat altered and impaired by the violence of the times, had in great measure weathered the rude shock of the Norman conquest. This had endeared it to the people in general, as well because it's decisions were universally known, as because it was found to be excellently adapted to the genius of the English nation. In the knowlege of this law consisted great part of the learning of those ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... nineteenth century could converse with the subjects of that monarch if these last could now be restored to life. The difficulties encountered would not arise merely from the intrusion of French terms, in consequence of the Norman conquest, because that large portion of our language (including the articles, pronouns, etc.), which is Saxon has also undergone great transformations by abbreviation, new modes of pronunciation, spelling, and various corruptions, so as to be unlike both ancient and modern German. They ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... story is an extract from Sir Walter Scott's novel, Ivanhoe, which describes life in England during the Middle Ages, something more than a century after the Norman Conquest. The hatred between the conquering Normans and the conquered Saxons still continued, and is graphically pictured by Scott. Ivanhoe centers about the household of one Cedric the Saxon, who was a great upholder of the traditions of ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... been able to labor, except on the condition that a considerable advance of capital had been made upon him. There is not a nail in all England, says Senior, which cannot directly or indirectly directly be traced back to savings made before the Norman conquest.(304) ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... was the first of the name of Wordsworth who came into Westmoreland, where he purchased the small estate of Sockbridge. He was descended from a family who had been settled at Peniston, in Yorkshire, near the sources of the Don, probably before the Norman Conquest. Their names appear on different occasions in all the transactions, personal and public, connected with that parish; and I possess, through the kindness of Colonel Beaumont, an almery, made in 1525, at the ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... only be secured by discipline, which makes of duty a habit" (General R. Taylor, C.S. Army). At the Battle of Hastings (Oct. 14, 1066) lack of discipline and disobedience of orders changed the fate of the English nation and brought about the Norman Conquest. Harold, the English king, had defeated the forces of Harold Hadraade, {12} King of Norway, at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire (Sept. 25, 1066). Four days later, Duke William of Normandy landed in Pevensey Bay, with 60,000 horse and foot. Harold hastened ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... duel it is expedient to deal with some Anglo-Saxon customs, which survived the Norman Conquest, and were founded on the same principle as the duel. The simplest of these processes was purgation by oath. Let us take the case of a person accused of theft. If he was a freeman and had hitherto borne a good name, all that was necessary was that he should purge himself ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... or Estaninges, and is honored to this day, on the 8th of February, in the great abbeys of Fecam, Jumieges, and others in Normandy: and his name occurs in the old Missal, used by the English Saxons before the Norman conquest, kept in the monastery of Jumieges, in which a proper mass is assigned for his feast on the 8th of February. In the account of the principal shrines of relics of saints, honored anciently in England, published by the most learned Dr. Hickes, mention is made of St. Cuthman's, as follows: ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... that the Saxons should have brought artificers of any kind with them, smiths perhaps alone excepted. Trades of every description must have been practised by the slaves whom they found. The same sort of transfer ensued upon the Norman conquest. After that event there could have been no fresh supply of domestic slaves, unless they were imported from Ireland, as well as carried thither for sale. That trade did not continue long. Emancipation was promoted ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... observed, those passages to which he alludes are not to be found in the earlier MSS. The description of Britain, which forms the introduction, and refers us to a period antecedent to the invasion of Julius Caesar; appears only in three copies of the "Chronicle"; two of which are of so late a date as the Norman Conquest, and both derived from the same source. Whatever relates to the succession of the Roman emperors was so universally known, that it must be considered as common property: and so short was the interval between the departure of ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... the Norman conquest had been, it might also have seemed, regarded in some of the aspects which it presented to the eye of the statesman then; for it was in the division of the former that the element of freedom stole in, it was ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... barriers between England and Scotland were not sufficient to prevent the extension of the Saxon settlements and kingdoms across the border. In the name of the Scotch capital we have a monument of a union before that of 1603. That the Norman Conquest did not include the Saxons of the Scotch Lowlands was due chiefly to the menacing attitude of Danish pretenders, and the other military dangers which led the Conqueror to guard himself on the north by a broad belt of desolation. Edward ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... expression of the significance of the spiritual conquest of England by Christianity. In the same book she shows how superficial is the view which believes that the English language was a creation of the Norman Conquest. The struggle, she says "between the English and French tongues lasted for some three hundred years, until the two finally blended into a unified language, basically Teutonic, richly romantic. The English ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Norman Conquest Hatfield, the Haethfield of the Saxons, became the property of the bishops of Ely, and was known as Bishops Hatfield, as indeed it is marked on many maps. There was here a magnificent palace, which at the Reformation became the property of Henry VIII., and was afterwards given to the ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... from sea to sea," he is being tragic at the cost of truth. Would he drag Wiltshire and all the pastoral West into his turmoil? You may go about any of the villages here, watch the daily doings of the inhabitants, and feel confident that, practically, there has been no substantial change since the Norman Conquest. The "feeling" of the scene is the same as it always was, the outlook of the people, their habit of mind, is the same. The one apparent difference is in religion, and that is not a difference of substance but of accident. We have forgotten ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... a time since the period of the Norman Conquest when the small earth dogs which we now call terriers were not known in these islands and used by sporting men as assistants in the chase, and by husbandmen for the killing of obnoxious vermin. The two little dogs shown in the Bayeux tapestry running ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... threw a heavy curtain over the bed-pole. Unluckily, Sir Richard is a poetical figment, and the Beresford ghost is a myth, like William Tell: he may be traced back through various mediaeval authorities almost to the date of the Norman Conquest. We have examined the story in a little book of folklore, Etudes Traditionistes. Always there is a compact to appear, always the ghost burns or injures the hand or wrist of the spectator. A version occurs ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... the Norman Conquest.*—Normandy was a province of France lying along the shore of the English Channel. Its line of dukes and at least a considerable proportion of its people were of the same Scandinavian or Norse race which made up such a large element in the population of England. They had, ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... antique engravings. It is a walled city, and has undergone many sieges and blockades. The castle has great celebrity, and is of Norman origin. Its walls are one mile and three fourths in length, and there are four great gates. The bridge over the Dee has seven arches, and is as old as the Norman conquest. The cathedral was built in the days of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. It is composed of red stone, and has a fine front. The chapter-house in the cloisters is universally admired by antiquarians. We went into one very old church, which was undergoing ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... The Norman conquest of England seemed balanced by a similar English conquest of France. But the chances of fate are many. Both Henry and his insane father-in-law died in the same year, and while Henry left only a tiny babe to succeed to his claims, the French King left ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... With the Norman Conquest, and the rapid rise of Westminster, the days of Winchester as the seat of government were numbered, although it was much favoured by the early Norman kings, possibly owing to its proximity to such hunting grounds as the New Forest Cranborne Chase (where ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... the Rhine? This might well have happened if Caesar and Crassus had changed provinces; and it is surely impossible to say that in such an event the venue (as lawyers say) of European civilization might not have been changed. The Norman Conquest in the same way was as much the act of a single man, as the writing of a newspaper article; and knowing as we do the history of that man and his family, we can retrospectively predict with all but infallible certainty, that no other person" (no other in that age, I presume, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... to see a book tracing the history and development of an imaginary Anglo-Saxon American line of ancestry, taking it from the forests of Northern Germany across to Britain, through the Norman conquest and down the stream of subsequent English history across seas to America—through savage wars and Revolution, perhaps across the Alleghenies, to settle finally in the great West. I would try to make the reader realize that here was no ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... Wellington won the battle of Waterloo, in 1815, the news had been telegraphed off immediately, there are some stars so remote that it would not yet have reached them. To go a step further, if in 1066 the result of the Norman Conquest had been wired to some of these stars, the message would ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... The work of the craft in olden time, as recorded by the chaplain of the Company in a little book he has prepared, giving the history of the Horners, was practised in the days of King Alfred. At least two hundred and fifty years before the Norman Conquest many of the patens and chalices used in churches were made by horners, and at one time cups, plates, and other vessels made of that useful material were in daily use ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess |
