"Norman Conquest" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... England during the Middle Ages; Comprising the Reigns from the Norman Conquest to the Accession of Henry VIII. ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... Byzantine design. In Apulia, as at Bari, Caserta Vecchia (1100), Molfetta (1192), and in Sicily, the Byzantine influence is conspicuous in the use of domes and in many of the decorative details. Particularly is this the case at Palermo and Monreale, where the churches erected after the Norman conquest—some of them domical, some basilican—show a strange but picturesque and beautiful mixture of Romanesque, Byzantine, and Arabic forms. The Cathedral of Monreale and the churches of the Eremiti and La Martorana at Palermo ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... this 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 Ely, it ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... 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 ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... 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 agitated ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Conception was celebrated in the Eastern Church in the early part of the eighth century and was celebrated on the 9th December (Kellner, Heortology, p. 242, et seq.). The feast was celebrated in England before the Norman Conquest (1066) (Bishop, On the Origins of Feast of the Conception of the ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... element which had contributed so much to the popularity of Waverley. The press has since that time groaned with his imitators. We have had historical novels of all classes and grades. We have had served up in this form the Norman Conquest and the Wars of the Roses, the Gunpowder Plot and the Fire of London, Darnley and Richelieu—and almost at the same moment with Mr. Macaulay's appeared a professed romance of Mr. Ainsworth's on the same subject— James II. Nay, on a novelist of this popular order has been conferred the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Parliament is 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 ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... Edward the Confessor, to the evil times of the Red King, was Wulstan of Worcester, a homely old man, of plain English character, and of great piety. The quiet, even tenor of his life is truly like a "soft green isle" in the midst of the turbulent storms and tempests of the Norman Conquest. ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... be classed with the extinct languages, it has certainly shown a marvelous vitality. More than four hundred years of Roman occupation, more than six hundred years of Saxon and Danish sway, a Norman conquest, a Saxon Reformation, and civil wars, have all passed over the land; but, like a tree that may bend before a storm but is not to be rooted up, the language of the Celts of Cornwall has lived on in an unbroken continuity for at least two thousand years. What does this mean? It means that through ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... 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 fairy tale—no tale of countries ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... vast amount of uncertainty there was to clear up, may be inferred from the wide differences of opinion among writers of the highest credit who preceded Mr Hunter in this inquiry. The celebrated historian of the Norman Conquest, M. Thierry, supposes Robin Hood to have been the chief of a small body of Saxons, who, in their forest strongholds, held out for a time against the domination of the Norman conquerors. On this point, as confessedly on others, the French historian seems ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... been the same for master and for man, in the field and on the table; the animal has never changed its plebeian name for an aristocratic name as it passed through the cook's hands. That example is typical of the curious mark which the Norman Conquest left on our speech, rendering it so much more difficult for us than for the French to attain equality of social intercourse. Inequality is stamped indelibly into our language as into no other great language. Of course, from the literary point of view, that is all ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... the present story, in 1874, it had never been heard of, and that the expression, "a Wessex peasant," or "a Wessex custom," would theretofore have been taken to refer to nothing later in date than the Norman Conquest. ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... and oppression have left behind a train of evil feelings, whose existence is only too real, however fantastic may be the shapes they assume. While three or four centuries sufficed to obliterate all trace of the Norman Conquest, and unite in indissoluble bonds of blood and language the two races who contended for mastery at Hastings, in Ireland, on the contrary, seven centuries have failed, not merely to efface, but even essentially to diminish the sharpness of the distinction ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... some more of the great poetry that was made before the Norman Conquest, and we shall first take one of the finest and most characteristic poems which remain to us, a poem founded on Bible story; the great poem, of which we have unfortunately only a ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... Margaret, sister of Edgar Atheling. The Norman conquest drove many Saxons north, and the Saxon element in Scotland ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... the rural gentry and yeomanry, and the burghers of the towns, for the purpose of curbing royalty, arresting the progress of centralization, and setting up representative government on a truly national scale. This grand result was partly due to peculiar circumstances which had their origin in the Norman conquest; but it was largely due to the political habits generated by long experience of local representative assemblies,—habits which made it comparatively easy for different classes of society to find their voice and use it for the attainment of ends in common. On the continent of Europe the encroaching ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... 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
... Physiography, has estimated that "at the present rate of wear and tear, denudation can have lowered the surface of the Thames Basin by hardly more than an inch since the Norman Conquest; and nearly a million years must elapse before the whole basin of the Thames will be worn down to the sea-level"; and Dr. A. Geikie, after a series of elaborate calculations, has postulated "as probably a fair average, a valley of 1000 feet deep may be excavated in 1,200,000 years." Taking ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... ancient Rome as bucca, though it would be audacious to infer that it arrived in Britain since the Norman Conquest. Hop-scotch is also exceedingly ancient, and the curious will find the theories of its origin in Mr. Gomme's learned work on Children's Dances and Songs, published by the Folk-Lore Society. Dr. Nicholson's book on the Folk-Lore of Children in Sutherland, ...
— The Nursery Rhyme Book • Unknown
... 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 their prescriptive rights ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... 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 ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... whose patriotism depends on history. A man who loves England for being English will not mind how she arose. But a man who loves England for being Anglo-Saxon may go against all facts for his fancy. He may end (like Carlyle and Freeman) by maintaining that the Norman Conquest was a Saxon Conquest. He may end in utter unreason—because he has a reason. A man who loves France for being military will palliate the army of 1870. But a man who loves France for being France will improve the army of 1870. This is exactly what the French have done, and France ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... "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 ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... the Norman conquest is told by two chroniclers—William of Apulia, who received his materials from Robert Guiscard, and Godfrey Malaterra, who wrote down the oral narrative of Roger. Thus we possess what is tantamount to personal memoirs of the Norman ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... that." He used to repeat with glee Lounsbury's witticism about "the infinite 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 of the faculty. Lincoln, now, ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... at the 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 those stars ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... 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 ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... reasoning, anything with so pronounced and unpleasant an odor must necessarily possess 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. ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... 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, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... It will be 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
... house. Then they built a room behind the solar for the daughters and the maidservants; the sons and the menservants still sleeping in the Hall. Presumably the house was at this stage in the time of King Ethelred, just before the Norman Conquest. The ladies' 'bower' followed, and after that the sleeping rooms for ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... later, and about fifty years before the Norman conquest of England, certain Persians settled at Kilwa in East Africa, led by Ali, who had been despised in his land because he was the son of a black Abyssinian slave mother. Kilwa, because of this, eventually became the most important commercial station on ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... did not teach this doctrine of prayer for the dead, it is curious to observe how in St. Patrick's second Council he expressly forbids the holy sacrifice being offered up after death for those who in life had made themselves unworthy of such suffrages. At the Synod of Cashel, held just after the Norman conquest, the claim of each dead man's soul to a certain part of his chattels after death was asserted. To steal a page from the time-worn chronicles of Scotland, it is told by Theodoric that when Queen Margaret of Scotland, that gentle and noble character upon whom the Church has placed the crown ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... Last Days of Pompeii, the author's greatest novel; The Last of the Barons, the story of the Earl of Warwick; Harold, The Last of the Saxons, a tale of the Norman Conquest of England. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... 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 King ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... 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 ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... B. The Political History of England. Vol. ii. From the Norman Conquest to the Death of ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... have been no mean or poor collection of villages in the days when she is first spoken of, when Eadward the Elder "incorporated with his own kingdom the whole Mercian lands on both sides of Watling Street" (Freeman's Norman Conquest, vol. i. p. 57), and took possession of London and of Oxford as the two most important parts of a scientific frontier. If any man had stood, in the days of Eadward, on the hill that was not yet "Shotover," and had looked along the plain ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... resist every defeat and prepare again for the contest. The whole surface of the country became studded with entrenchments, moats, and mounds, within whose line the harassed Saxon defended his property and all he valued in his home. History begins, as far as England is practically concerned, with the Norman Conquest. It was then the Norsemen, blue-eyed, fair-haired, the finest blood in Europe, planted themselves in Norfolk and Suffolk, and brought with them feudalism and civilization. It was in 787 that, according to the Saxon Chronicle, they first reached England; but it was ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... with that 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... was not till 1864 that the campaign became systematic. At that time the editor secured the services of Edward Augustus Freeman, who had been for several years a contributor on miscellaneous topics. Freeman is well known as the historian of the Norman Conquest, as an active politician, controversialist, and pamphleteer. Froude toiled for months and years over parchments and manuscripts often almost illegible, carefully noting the caligraphy, and among the authors of a joint composition assigning his proper share ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... 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 Forest, ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... is not likely even 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 by the clergy, and slavery was exchanged for vassalage, which in like ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... 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 ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... 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 the ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... the nearest of the stars, what time must it take to get to the others? If, when 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 still be on ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... of record of general jurisdiction are daily opened by a formal proclamation made, at the command of the judge, by the crier or sheriff's officer in attendance. In many States the ancient English style of expression has been preserved, which dates back to the Norman conquest, and begins with a cry of "Oyez, Oyez, Oyez." These proclamations are often closed with such words as (for instance) "God save the Commonwealth of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations." The adjournment from day to day is announced in a similar ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... reign of Henry the Seventh, all the political differences which had agitated England since the Norman conquest seemed to be set at rest. The long and fierce struggle between the Crown and the Barons had terminated. The grievances which had produced the rebellions of Tyler and Cade had disappeared. Villanage was scarcely ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Isle of Ely plays so important a part in the history of the Norman Conquest, and was the scene of the last great stand made against the Conqueror, neither the party of Hereward and the Camp of Refuge, nor the forces of the king, did any material damage to the buildings of the monastery. Its affairs were indeed brought to confusion, as the monks had sided ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... 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 ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... 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 joyous ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... previous dramatic work, "Queen Mary"; he will gain less by this. It is good of course to a certain degree, but it is only "fair to middling" Tennysonian work. We find in it not a passage that stirs us, not one that charms. It puts the story of the Norman Conquest of England into a dramatic form and into good blank verse, with sound and sensible treatment of the subject, and that is all. Its author's good taste, and above all his experience, his dexterity, acquired ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... which (as is well known) represent the principal events in the Norman Conquest, are arranged in fifty-eight groups. The legend of ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... from a family in Staffordshire, of so great antiquity that it claims a place among the few that extend their line beyond the Norman conquest; and was the son of William Congreve, second son of Richard Congreve, of Congreve and Stratton. He visited, once, at least, the residence of his ancestors; and, I believe, more places than one are still shown, in groves and gardens, where he is related ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Europe. In the Crusades she took no part, and reaped none of the signal advantages resulting from that great movement. Her whole energies were directed toward throwing off the yoke of her civilized but "unbelieving" oppressors. For a longer time than has now elapsed since the Norman Conquest of England, the entire Gothic population of Spain was engaged in unceasing religious and patriotic warfare. The unlimited power thus acquired by an unscrupulous clergy, and the spirit of uncompromising bigotry ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... 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 ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... the characters, events, and, so to speak, with the very physiognomy of a period ante Agamemnona; before the brilliant age of matured chivalry, which has given to song and romance the deeds of the later knighthood, and the glorious frenzy of the Crusades. The Norman Conquest was our Trojan War; an epoch beyond which our learning seldom induces our imagination ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 could ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke
... comparison of countries which have undergone it with countries which have not—a comparison, for instance, of England with Ireland or Germany. Perhaps the nearest parallel in the history of Wales to the Norman Conquest of England is the conquest of Wales by Cunedda, the founder of the Cymric kingdom, in the dark and troublous times which followed the withdrawal of the Roman troops from Britain. But though an invader and a conqueror, Cunedda was not an ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... 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. I have met with this word in no Anglo-Saxon work, except in the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... monsters afterwards—that the poor 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. She had had so many governesses: ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 in ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... was 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
... work, in rude alliterative verse (for rhyme was introduced in England only after the Norman Conquest), is the most valuable old English manuscript in the British Museum. Although much damaged by fire, it has been carefully studied by learned men. They have patiently restored the poem, the story of which ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... of St. Peter-Port, the principal town of that romantic island. The family, whose original name was De Sausmarez, is of Norman extraction, and of great antiquity in the island of Guernsey, where their lineage can be traced almost to the Norman conquest. ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... 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 a ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... of 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 chiefs or jarls preferred to seek new homes across the seas rather than submit to his rule. So ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... 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 of cattle slaughtered for ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... political being, that, badges of conquest as they are, no one feels them to be badges of conquest— all this comes of the fact that, if the Norman came as a conqueror, he came as a conqueror of a special, perhaps almost of an unique kind. The Norman Conquest of England has, in its nature and in its results, no exact parallel in history. And that it has no exact parallel in history is largely owing to the character and position of the man who wrought it. That the history of England for the last eight hundred years has ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... Professor Manly, in his Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama. The earliest example there is may be dated as early as 967, an important landmark for us, as it is often assumed that we have no dramatic record of any kind in these islands earlier than the Norman Conquest. Another generation or two of research, such as the pioneer work of Dr. Furnivall and the Early English Text Society has made possible, and we shall distinguish clearly the two lines of growth, French and Norman, ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... 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 English—- were written, besides many other short ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... 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 ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... been conquered by a powerful nation, it would at least have participated in the progress of the conquering power. But none of these things happened. England, whose political and social development had been hastened by the Norman Conquest, desired to extend her influence to Ireland. 'She wished,' as Froude strangely tells us, 'to complete the work of civilisation happily begun by the Danes.' But in actual fact she only succeeded in trammelling the development of Irish society, and maintaining in the country an appalling ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... 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 power ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... some expert of "old masters." A little moss here and there, a network of ivy, a judicious use of ferns and grass, a careless display of weeds and wild flowers, and in twenty years Nature can make a modern building look as if it dated from the Norman Conquest. I came upon this reflection because, actually, my canal is not very old, though from the way it impressed me, and from the manner in which I have introduced it, the reader might well imagine it as old as Venice and no younger ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... own way; verjuice, when they didn't: and, to conclude, egotists 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 pulled her to ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... 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 is doubtful whether even in the fourteenth ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... 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 third ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... 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 ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... Richmond at once. The rich sloping meadows by the river, crowned with dense woodlands, surround us and form a beautiful setting of green for the town, which has come down from the fantastic days of the Norman Conquest without any drastic or unseemly changes, and thus has still the compactness and the romantic outline ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... features of resemblance assist its appearance of antiquity, as the wooden framework, which is observable in the oldest specimens of house-building in this country. According to Strutt, the Saxons usually built their houses of clay, kept together by wooden frames; shortly after the Norman Conquest plaster was intermixed with timber, and subsequently the basement story was made of stone. The upper apartments were so constructed as to project over the lower, and considerable ornament both in carved wood and plaster was introduced about the doors and windows and roof of the building. Nevertheless, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 573, October 27, 1832 • Various
... Period. Specimens of the Language. The Norman Conquest. Typical Norman Literature. Geoffrey of Monmouth. First Appearance of the Legends of Arthur. Types of Middle-English Literature. Metrical Romances. Some Old Songs. Summary of the Period. Selections ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... 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 ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... Upon the Norman Conquest the feudal law was introduced here in all its rigor, the whole of which is built on a military plan. I shall not now enter into the particulars of that constitution, which belongs more properly to the next part of our "Commentaries"; but shall ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... Agatha" I got four shillings for the best 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 know a lot ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... 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 ...
— A Description of Modern Birmingham • Charles Pye
... that we may be sure that none of the English of the 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 ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... a great 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
... they were sacked, gutted, battered with warlike 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, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... long-skulled people. So were the Danes and the Norsemen who followed them; though it is very possible that the active slave trade which went on, and the intercourse with Ireland, may have introduced a certain admixture of the dark stock into both Denmark and Norway. The Norman conquest brought in new ethnological elements, the precise value of which cannot be estimated with exactness; but as to their quality, there can be no question, inasmuch as even the wide area from which William drew his followers could yield him nothing but the fair and the dark types of men, ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... explanation of the assertion made just now—namely, that we might almost reconstruct our history, so far as it turns upon the Norman Conquest, by an analysis of our present language, a mustering of its words in groups, and a close observation of the nature and character of those which the two races have severally contributed to it. Thus we should confidently conclude that the ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... especially gifted in any way or fitted by her upbringing to earn her daily bread. Long years of her girlhood had been spent at a select school, and in the result she knew a part of the Book of Kings by heart, with the Mercy speech from the Merchant of Venice and the date of the Norman Conquest. Every day she bought the Fieramosca, and she tried to see the other local papers when they came out. Several people advertised who wanted to exchange lessons, but no one seemed inclined to pay. Once she saw names she knew in ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... an English novelist who never attained much popularity in France. The success of translations of Scott had called the attention of the trade to English novels. The race of publishers, all agog for a second Norman conquest, were seeking industriously for a second Scott, just as at a rather later day every one must needs look for asphalt in stony soil, or bitumen in marshes, and speculate in projected railways. The stupidity of the Paris commercial world is conspicuous in these attempts to do the same thing twice, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... the system of penalty by fine, and the responsibility of the tithing for the misdeeds of any of its members. There is no direct evidence as to the extent to which feudal tenures were beginning to be established before the Norman conquest. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... 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 of England. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... natural and inherited tendency towards "business upon great waters"; and yet the English navy dates from the days of Queen Elizabeth. It is true that the Plantagenet wars with France checked what was perhaps already a nautical bias, and that had it not been for the Norman conquest, England, perchance would have become a sea power at an earlier date. But at best the tendency is only a thousand years old. In Egypt it is seven or eight thousand years old at the lowest computation. It makes one smile to think of Egypt as a naval power. It is the business of the historian to ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... 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 ...
— A Glossary of Provincial Words & Phrases in use in Somersetshire • Wadham Pigott Williams
... historical work, which takes a great deal out of my brain, and I shall be glad to know what is the best kind of diet for nourishing the brain-cells. Fish has been strongly recommended to me. Would a herring and a half for breakfast take me through a chapter on the Norman Conquest? If a herring and a half does for WILLIAM the Conqueror, how many would be necessary for ELIZABETH? Would a whole salmon or barrel of oysters be best for tackling our early ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 11, 1891 • Various
... are old enough to remember the shock of awed surmise which fell upon young minds presented, in the late 'seventies or early 'eighties of the last century, with Freeman's "Norman Conquest" or Green's "Short History of the English People"; in which as through paring clouds of darkness, we beheld our ancestry, literary as well as political, radiantly legitimised; though not, to be sure, in the ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... 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 ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... (Scotland) Act 1874, there is, however, not much distinction between burgage tenure and free holding. It is usual to speak of the English burgage-tenure as a relic of Saxon freedom resisting the shock of the Norman conquest and its feudalism, but it is perhaps more correct to consider it a local feature of that general exemption from feudality enjoyed by the municipia as a relic of their ancient Roman constitution. The reason for the system preserving for so long its specifically distinct form in Scottish ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... looking like a fortress, but terrified at 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 Bethencourt ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... the term "Lothian" in the strict sense; but it 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 in the ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... 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
... 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. To be published in Four Parts. Part I. price 7s. 6d., Part ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... letter H in its place except occasionally, but she knew how to send a selfish thought back to its place. She did not know one creed from another, but she loved what she saw to be good. She knew nothing of the Norman conquest, but she knew much of self-conquest. She could make her breakfast off dry bread, that her mother might have hot coffee and the best of butter. She wore very shabby frocks, but she would not put bad work ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... fishery, our fens, forests, and commons, and our trade at sea, &c.: which would give the body of the nation a comfortable subsistence. And the breaking that cursed yoke of Tithes would much help thereto. Also another thing I cannot but mention; which is that the Norman Conquest and Tyranny is continued upon the nation without any thought of removing it: I mean the tenure of land by copyhold, and holding for life under a lord, or rather tyrant, of a manor; whereby people care not to improve ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... out that it is easier to make resolutions for ourselves than to impress them upon other people. Godfrey was by no means inclined for his history lesson that morning. Betty had taken a great deal of trouble to understand about the Norman Conquest herself, and to make it easy for Godfrey, but he would not take any interest to-day in the oppression of the poor Saxons, or the curfew bell, ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... and patriotism in her people. Private virtues and 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, intelligence, foresight, broad views, manly feelings, ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... England." During his residence in Ireland and England, he had read with great interest all books relating to the early history of the Government of England. He began with, the history of England after the Norman Conquest; but he found that he must begin at the beginning. He studied the history of the Anglo-Saxons, but found it "like a vast forest, where the traveller, with great difficulty, finds a few narrow paths to guide his wandering steps. It was this, however, that inspired him with the design ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 231, April 1, 1854 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... 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 ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... 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
... 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, Ecclesia Deiparae ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... grants of land, and had thegns under them; in this way the class of thegns widened; subsequently the name was allowed to the ceorl who had acquired four hides of land and fulfilled certain requirements; after the Norman Conquest the thegnhood practically embraced the knighthood; the name dropped out of use after Henry II.'s reign, but lasted longer ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 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 received rich reward ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... Cuthman was titular patron of Steninges 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 ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... the Norman Conquest and of Domesday Book about the old town. Research will soon find out, if she looks sharp, that there is nothing Norman in the place except the old arch in the amorphous church-tower, and a castle at a distance on the flats. But the flavour of the past is stronger in the scattered memories of ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... of the article has not studied history very deeply," said von Kwarl. "The impossible thing that he speaks of has been done before, and done in these very islands, too. The Norman Conquest became an assimilation ...
— When William Came • Saki
... 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 Middle ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 beauty in the fullest ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... it must be a re-translation into the dialect in which it was first written. A further difficulty lies in the fact stated by Haigh that runes had passed out of date on funeral monuments as late as the year 1000, and we can indeed scarcely conceive of their use at the very eve of the Norman Conquest when the written language had long ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... OF ST. JAMES, completed his twenty-first year, an event which created almost as great a sensation among the aristocracy of England as the Norman Conquest. A minority of twenty years had converted a family always amongst the wealthiest of Great Britain into one of the richest in Europe. The Duke of St. James possessed estates in the north and in the west of England, besides a whole province in Ireland. In London there were a very handsome square ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... a tax on. But, though she got over this obstacle by a new 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 zeal of ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... and confused but honest and well-informed, tells us much of the religious movement in Normandy, and is particularly valuable and detailed in his account of the period after the battle of Senlac. Among secondary authorities for the Norman Conquest, Simeon of Durham is useful for northern matters, and William of Malmesbury worthy of note for his remarkable combination of Norman and English feeling. Domesday Book is of course invaluable for the Norman ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... of 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, in an old Breton manor-house. ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... and fifteen years since that gargoyle was lifted into its place. The Crusades were going on about that time; the robber barons were sallying out onto the plains on their raiding excursions. The Norman Conquest had taken place. From this very town of Ypres had gone across the Channel "workmen and artisans to build churches and feudal castles, weavers and workers ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... is most certain! But if, at Mr. Wilson's summons, we reject as improbable a series of events supported by far stronger evidence than can be adduced for the conquests of Alexander, the Crusades, or the Norman conquest of England, what is it, we may ask, that he calls upon us to believe? His skepticism, as so often happens, affords the measure of his credulity. He contends that Cortes, the greatest Spaniard of the sixteenth century, a man little acquainted with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... damage to the church. The building was, however, restored by Canute, who made further atonement by hanging up his crown within its walls, and bringing back the body of Alphege, who had been martyred by the Danes. In the year 1067 the storms of the Norman Conquest overwhelmed St. Augustine's church, which was completely destroyed by fire, together with many royal deeds of privilege and papal bulls, and other ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... so carried the Gospel of Jesus with them. As a Tribe they finally settled in Normandy, and gave to France her Protestantism, which, from that day to this, Catholicism has not been able entirely to uproot, though it has made several desperate attempts. They finally, however, as a Tribe, under the Norman conquest, entered England and united with the other nine Tribes. Their advent, and the way they came, is very graphically symbolised in the unicorn on the royal arms of England. The unicorn is looking Westward, and is attached ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... custom, there are others also in this manor which indicate great antiquity, and which, there can be but little if any doubt, are the same as were in use before the Norman Conquest. We are told, indeed, by Judge Blackstone, that after that event the ancient Saxon system of tenure was laid aside, and that the Normans, wherever they had lands granted to them, introduced the feodal system; and that at length it was adopted generally, ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... one night, and burnt him and sixty men to death there. That was the end of Rognwald, the invaluable jarl, always true to Haarfagr; and distinguished in world history by producing Rolf the Ganger, author of the Norman Conquest of England, and Turf-Einar, who invented peat in the Orkneys. Whether Rolf had left Norway at this time there is no chronology to tell me. As to Rolf's surname, "Ganger," there are various hypotheses; the likeliest, perhaps, that Rolf was so weighty a man ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... by the Norman Conquest, in the modification of all the old habits of Great Britain, and in making the English that which they now are, has descended as an heirloom to some old aristocratic families of the kingdom, where it ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... length stopped in front of a dinky little two-by-four station, with a cluster of worm-eaten old houses and a couple of sloppy-looking store buildings near it that looked as if they had all been erected prior to the Norman Conquest, or even possibly antedated the ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... 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. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... who 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
... Westmoreland. My grandfather 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 expense of a William Wordsworth, as is expressed in a Latin inscription carved upon ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... 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 ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... (1057-1093) brought Scotland into closer connection with western Europe and western Christianity. The Norman Conquest (1066) increased the tendency of the English-speaking people of Lothian to acquiesce in the rule of a Celtic king, rather than in that of the adventurers who followed William of Normandy. Norman operations did not at first reach Cumberland, which Malcolm held; and, on the death ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... countries, yet as a national sentiment, it must be traced to those habits of thinking which we derive from the nation from whom the inhabitants of these States have in general sprung. In England, for a long time after the Norman Conquest, the authority of the monarch was almost unlimited. Inroads were gradually made upon the prerogative, in favor of liberty, first by the barons, and afterwards by the people, till the greatest part of its most formidable pretensions became extinct. But it was not ...
— The Federalist Papers
... of representation first found its beginning in the Saxon witenagemot. It was lost in the Norman conquest. It was restored step by step, through the centuries in which parliament established its power as an institution through the granting or withholding of aids and taxes for the king's use. It was brought to America by the English ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root
... but little posterior to the Christian aera; and many antiquarians are disposed to believe that such was really the case. At the same time, even allowing the truth of this surmise in its fullest extent, it is most probable that the Roman castle had fallen into ruin and disuse long before the Norman conquest. ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... AND INFLUENCE.—The tapestry at Bayeux represents in a series of pictures the course of the Norman conquest. There we see the costume of the combatants. The Norman gentlemen were mounted, and fought with lance and sword. Of their bravery and military skill, their success affords abundant proof. Although the Normans were victors and ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... 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 exhausted ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... defeated in this world; and that everything in the long run 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 ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... manorial system, the rise of which preceded the Norman Conquest, communal methods of husbandry remained, but the position of the cultivator was radically altered. "Villeins,'' instead of free-holders, formed the most numerous class of the population. They were bound to the soil and occupied holdings ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... derives its name from the river Avon (corrupted from Avan), which also gave its name to a medieval lordship. On the Norman conquest at Glamorgan, Caradoc, the eldest son of the defeated prince, Lestyn ab Gwrgan, continued to hold this lordship, and for the defence of thc passage of the river built here a castle whose foundations ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... 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 snuffed out ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson |
