"At the accession of Harold to the crown, the English had enjoyed a peace of nearly fifty years, purchased by the final expulsion and destruction of their Danish invaders; they were becoming more and more enamoured of the arts of peace, and had made considerable progress in such civilisation as the times allowed. Agriculture was cultivated with great assiduity and success, and the national mind began to appreciate the benefits to be derived from foreign trade and commerce. The military spirit which had animated the descendants of Hengist and Horsa was gradually dying out, and the nation, united under one head, looked back with disgust and contempt on the obscure and bloody civil wars of the Heptarchy. The fortifications of the towns were allowed to fall into decay, and the equipment and discipline of the troops were almost entirely neglected. Dwelling in peace and security under their free elective institutions, the English looked with gradually increasing disfavour on the profession of arms. While the mailed chivalry of Normandy were carrying their banners even to the islands and peninsulas of the Mediteranean, the Saxon was content to fight on foot and to protect himself from the blows of a steel-clad man-at-arms by the imperfect defence of a surcoat of hide. His offensive arms were as imperfect as his defensive; he relied almost exclusively on the ponderous battleaxe, which, requiring both hands to wield it, necessarily left the person of the soldier exposed to the lance or the arrow. Yet, with all this, the nation was possessed by a spirit of the most overweening confidence and self-satisfied security. Proud of the exploits of their ancestors, believing in the perpetuity of the long peace they had enjoyed, satisfied with their republican institutions, and mistaking internal freedom for external strength, they looked with inert tranquillity on the gradual increase and organization of the power which was to overwhelm them; and when at last the blow fell, the nation, at once confident in its valour and impatient of military fatigue and privations, flung away its hopes in a single unequal conflict rather than endure the slow and desolating tactics which must have worn out the strength of the invader. The English met their enemies with one-third of their number, believing as devoutly as the pothouse heroes of our own times that one Englishman to three Frenchmen was a perfectly equal match, and that the total absence of cavalry and artillery on their side would be easily compensated by superior personal bravery. The nation was, at any rate, content to abide the trial, thinking that even if this army miscarried, it would be easy to overwhelm the invaders by a general rising. The army fell, and the nation with it.