Harold was declared to be an usurper, perhaps declared excommunicated.  The right to the English crown was declared to be in the Duke of the Normans, and William was solemnly blessed in the enterprise in which he was at once to win his own rights, to chastise the wrong-doer, to reform the spiritual state of the misguided islanders, to teach them fuller obedience to the Roman See and more regular payment of its temporal dues.  William gained his immediate point; but his successors on the English throne paid the penalty.  Hildebrand gained his point for ever, or for as long a time as men might be willing to accept the Bishop of Rome as a judge in any matters.  The precedent by which Hildebrand, under another name, took on him to dispose of a higher crown than that of England was now fully established.

As an outward sign of papal favour, William received a consecrated banner and a ring containing a hair of Saint Peter.  Here was something for men to fight for.  The war was now a holy one.  All who were ready to promote their souls’ health by slaughter and plunder might flock to William’s standard, to the standard of Saint Peter.  Men came from most French-speaking lands, the Normans of Apulia and Sicily being of course not slow to take up the quarrel of their kinsfolk.  But, next to his own Normandy, the lands which sent most help were Flanders, the land of Matilda, and Britanny, where the name of the Saxon might still be hateful.  We must never forget that the host of William, the men who won England, the men who settled in England, were not an exclusively Norman body.  Not Norman, but French, is the name most commonly opposed to English, as the name of the conquering people.  Each Norman severally would have scorned that name for himself personally; but it was the only name that could mark the whole of which he and his countrymen formed a part.  Yet, if the Normans were but a part, they were the greatest and the noblest part; their presence alone redeemed the enterprise from being a simple enterprise of brigandage.  The Norman Conquest was after all a Norman Conquest; men of other lands were merely helpers.  So far as it was not Norman, it was Italian; the subtle wit of Lombard Lanfranc and Tuscan Hildebrand did as much to overthrow us as the lance and bow of Normandy.

CHAPTER VII—­WILLIAM’S INVASION OF ENGLAND—­AUGUST-DECEMBER 1066

The statesmanship of William had triumphed.  The people of England had chosen their king, and a large part of the world had been won over by the arts of a foreign prince to believe that it was a righteous and holy work to set him on the throne to which the English people had chosen the foremost man among themselves.  No diplomatic success was ever more thorough.  Unluckily we know nothing of the state of feeling in England while William was plotting and pleading beyond the sea.  Nor do we know how much men