And yet I don’t know.  What a different England it would have been if William of Normandy had failed or had never landed here at all.  And if such an England could have endured how changed would have been the whole destiny of Europe.  I am not sure after all that we ought not to be as uplifted by the memory of Hastings as we are or should be by the memory of Caesar’s advent.  At any rate since Hastings was fought and won in the eleventh century any national prejudices that belong wholly to the modern world are quite as much out of place with regard to it as they are with regard to Caesar or St Augustine.  And if we must be indignant and remember old injuries that as often as not were sheer blessings, scarcely in disguise, let us reserve our hatred, scorn and contempt for those damned pagan and pirate hordes that first from Schleswig-Holstein and later from Denmark descended upon our Christian country, and for a time overwhelmed us with their brutish barbarism.  As for me I am for the Duke of Normandy; without him England were not the England of my heart.

Now the great and beautiful road up out of Hastings, seven miles into Battle, is not only one of the loveliest in Britain, every yard of it is full of Duke William’s army, and thence we may see how in its wonderful simplicity all that mighty business which was decided that October morning on the hill-top that for so long Battle Abbey guarded as a holy place, was accomplished.  For looking southward over the often steep escarpment, always between three and five hundred feet over the sea plain, we may see Pevensey Castle, the landing, Hastings, the port, and at last come to Battle, the scene of the fight that gave England to the Norman for our enormous good and glory and honour.

I say that the struggle for the English crown between Duke William of Normandy and Harold, King of England, was in no sense of the word a national struggle; on the contrary, it was a personal question fought and decided by the Duke of Normandy and his men, and Harold and his men.  Indeed the society of that time was altogether innocent of any impulse which could be called national.  That society, all of one piece as it was, both in England and in Gaul, was wholly Feudal, though somewhat less precisely so here than in Normandy.  Men’s allegiance was not given to any such vague unity as England, but to a feudal lord, in whose quarrel they were bound to fight, in whose victory they shared, and in whose defeat they suffered.  The quarrel between King Harold and Duke William was in no sense of the word a national quarrel but a personal dispute in which the feudal adherents of both parties were necessarily involved, the gage being the crown and spoil of England.  This is at once obvious when we remember that the ground of William’s claim to the throne was a promise received from King Edward personally, unconfirmed by council or witan, but endorsed for his own part by Harold when shipwreck had placed him in Duke William’s power.  Such were the true elements of the dispute.