She rode forth clothéd on with chastity: The deep air listened round her as she rode, ----the barking cur Made her cheek flame; her palfry’s foot-fall shot Light horror thro’ her pulses: One low churl compact of thankless earth Peep’d--but his eyes, before they had their will Were shrivelled into darkness in his head, And she, that knew not, pass’d; and all at once With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon Was clash’d and hammered from a hundred towers, One after one: But even then she gained Her bower; whence re-issuing, robed and crowned, To meet her lord, she took the tax away And built herself an everlasting name. Observe--that I call up these modern writers and their language, out of their turn as may seem to you, only that I may plant more distinctly in your thought the old incidents to which their words relate. It is as if I were speaking to you of some long-gone line of ancestors, and on a sudden should call up some delicate blond child and say--This one is in the line of direct descent; she bears the same old name, she murmurs the same old tunes; and this shimmer of gold in her hair is what shone on the heads of the good Saxon foreparents. _William the Norman._ We now come to a date to be remembered, and in the neighborhood of which our first morning’s talk will come to an end. It is the date of the Norman Conquest--1066--that being the year of the Battle of Hastings, when the brave Harold, last of the Saxon kings went down, shot through the eye; and the lithe, clean-faced, smirking William of Normandy “gat him” the throne of England. These new-comers were not far-away cousins of our Saxon and Danish forefathers; only so recently as the reign of Alfred had they taken permanent foothold in that pleasant Norman country. But they have not brought the Norse speech of the old home land with them: they have taken to a Frankish language--we will call it Norman French--which is thenceforth to blend with the Saxonism of Alfred, until two centuries or more later, our own mother English--the English of Chaucer and of Shakespeare--is evolved out of the union. Not only a new tongue, do these conquerors bring with them, but madrigals and ballads and rhyming histories; they have great contempt for the stolid, lazy-going Latin records of the Saxon Chroniclers; they love a song better. In the very face of the armies at Hastings, their great minstrel _Taillefer_ had lifted up his voice to chant the glories of Roland, about which all the histories of the time will tell you.