The Story of England: The Founding of the Norman Kingdom

A few thousand knights and men-at-arms had conquered a nation of between a million and a half and two million people. Six centuries had passed since the Angles and Saxons had established their kingdoms in the Roman province of Britain, and four since England’s conversion to Christianity—distances of time as great as those which divide us from the days of Edward III and Elizabeth. England had led western Europe in monastic learning when the Normans’ ancestors had been savages. Her craftsmen were famous throughout Christendom and her patient, industrious husbandmen, with their love of the soil and genius for managing their local affairs, had given her the framework of village and shire. She was still what Alfred’s successors had made her—the best administered and richest of the western kingdoms.