At the very moment when Pope and Caesar held each other in the death grasp, a church which had hitherto maintained a sort of insular and barbaric independence was brought into a far more intimate connection with the Roman See.  The conquest of England by William wrought less immediate change than when the first English conquerors slew, expelled, or enslaved the whole nation of the vanquished Britons or than when Africa was subdued by Genseric.  But it wrought a greater immediate change than the conquest of Sicily by Charles of Anjou.  It brought with it not only a new dynasty, but a new nobility.  It did not expel or transplant the English nation or any part of it; but it gradually deprived the leading men and families of England of their land and offices, and thrust them down into a secondary position under the alien intruders.

It must not be forgotten that the old English constitution survived the Norman Conquest.  What the constitution had been under the Saxon Eadgar, that it remained under William.  The laws, with a few changes in detail, and also the language of the public documents, remained the same.  The powers vested in King William and his Witan remained constitutionally the same as those which had been vested in King Eadgar and his Witan a hundred years before.  Immense changes ensued in social condition and administration, and in the relation of the kingdom to foreign lands.  There was also a vast increase of royal power, and new relations were introduced between the king and every class of his subjects; but formal constitutional changes there were none.

I cannot too often repeat, for the saying is the very summing up of the whole history, that the Norman Conquest was not the wiping out of the constitution, the laws, the language, the national life of Englishmen.  The English kingship gradually changed from the old Teutonic to the later mediaeval type; but the change began before the Norman Conquest.  It was hastened by that event; it was not completed till long after it, and the gradual transition, was brought to perfection by Henry II.

Certain events indicate the remoter causes of the Norman Conquest.  The accession of Eadward at once brings us among the events that led immediately to that conquest, or rather we may look on the accession of this Saxon king as the first stage of the conquest itself.  Swend and Cnut, the Danes, had shown that it was possible for a foreign power to overcome England by force of arms.

The misgovernment of the sons of Cnut hindered the formation of a lasting Danish dynasty in England.  The throne of Cerdic was again filled by a son of Woden; but there can be no doubt that the shock given to the country by the Danish Conquest, especially the way in which the ancient nobility was cut off in the long struggle with Swend and Cnut, directly opened the way for the coming of the Norman.  Eadward did his best, wittingly or unwillingly, to make his path still easier.  This he did by accustoming Englishmen to the sight of strangers—­not national kinsmen like Cnut’s Danes, but Frenchmen, men of utterly alien speech and manners—­enjoying every available place of honour or profit in the country.