of their French possessions, England began to struggle against the
domination of men felt to be foreigners, and so gradually became
conscious of her separate nationality, though still only in a
fashion, as the manor of an ENGLISH lord.

It is beyond the scope of this piece to give anything like a
connected story, even of the slightest, of the course of events
between the conquest of Duke William and the fully developed
mediaeval period of the fourteenth century, which is the England that
I have before my eyes as Mediaeval or Feudal. That period of the
fourteenth century united the developments of the elements which had
been stirring in Europe since the final fall of the Roman Empire, and
England shared in the general feeling and spirit of the age,
although, from its position, the course of its history, and to a
certain extent the lives of its people, were different. It is to
this period, therefore, that I wish in the long run to call your
attention, and I will only say so much about the earlier period as
may be necessary to explain how the people of England got into the
position in which they were found by the Statute of Labourers enacted
by Edward III., and the Peasants' Rebellion in the time of his
grandson and successor, Richard II.

Undoubtedly, then, the Norman Conquest made a complete break in the
continuity of the history of England. When the Londoners after the
Battle of Hastings accepted Duke William for their king, no doubt
they thought of him as occupying much the same position as that of
the newly slain Harold; or at any rate they looked on him as being
such a king of England as Knut the Dane, who had also conquered the
country; and probably William himself thought no otherwise; but the
event was quite different; for on the one hand, not only was he a man