difficult position; and the power falling more and more out of the hands of the degenerate Anglo-Saxons, passed over to the stronger Danes and their Norman kinsmen. With an unmixed population, England would have been able to maintain herself united and powerful in the hour of danger, and when threatened by foreign conquerors. But split and divided as she now was among different races contending for the mastery, real unanimity was impossible; and, in case of a powerful attack from without, dissolution was inevitable. Through the Danish expeditions, the Danish colonizations, and finally through the fall of the Danish supremacy, it became practicable for William of Normandy to conquer England with an army of only 60,000 men. Had not those events prepared the way, it would be inconceivable that with such a force a foreign conqueror should have been able to subdue a country so extensive, so well peopled, and so favoured by nature; still less that he should have succeeded in retaining such a conquest for any length of time. William won the battle of Hastings, which decided the fate of England, only because Harald Godvinsön’s Anglo-Saxon army entered the field weakened and exhausted by the sanguinary battle of Stamford Bridge. This was fought against the Norwegian king, Harald Haardraade, and the discontented Scandinavians in the north of England, who wanted to re-establish a king of their own race on the English throne. The Danish-Norwegian settlements, and the Danish dominion in England, by subduing for a time the political power of the Anglo-Saxons, had not only prepared the way for the first victory of the Normans, but also for the future progress and establishment of the Norman power in England, and especially for the ultimate triumph of the Norman popular spirit over the remains of the ancient Saxon nationality. The Danes, by expelling the Anglo-Saxons from the northern and eastern parts of England, as well as by mixing with them in the south, had by degrees undermined their national independence and their popular characteristics, and had thus prepared an entrance for the Scandinavian spirit, which was so nearly allied to the Norman, into a great, if not the greater, portion of the English population. The bold and chivalrous spirit of the Norman aristocracy, their love of daring adventures, and their lofty feeling of freedom, completely agreed with the characteristics of the Scandinavians settled in England at an earlier period. The Normans found among the Scandinavian population of England, and particularly the Danish portion of it, several of those free institutions already in full force which they themselves, with much advantage to liberty, afterwards extended to the whole country.