King Alfred the Great passed away, and all the line of Saxon and Danish monarchs after him; yet probably the curfew, under one or another of its ancient names, was kept up as a national observance in each of their reigns, with more or less laxity. At last the Conqueror came, and after that sanguinary struggle, which had to roughly pave the way for England's advancement, he set himself the task of governing the people he had overcome. Whether he found the law of the curfew still feebly kept up, or whether it had died out we cannot tell, but we know that two years after the battle of Hastings--in 1068--he ordered fires to be covered at the ringing of an eight o'clock bell, and the people to retire to rest. He had probably been accustomed to a similar regulation in Normandy; and it is evident the enactment, however more severely enforced than the Saxons had previously experienced, could not have been purposed as a suspicious and contemptuous safeguard against them, for the haughty robbers called nobles were as subject to the curfew as the meanest swineherds they owned. There seems to have been, from an indefinitely early period, a religious service at eight in the evening. When William, after the injuries received by the plunging of his horse as it trod upon hot ashes, lay dying, the vesper bell of a neighbouring church aroused him from the stupor which had gathered round his sinking mind. He asked if he were in England, and if that were the curfew ringing, and on being told he was in "his own Normandy," and the bell was for evening prayer, he "charged them bid the monks pray for his soul, and remained awhile dull and heavy." Polydore-Vergil tells us that William, to convert the native ferocity of the people to indolence, ordained that the head of each family should retire to rest at eight in the evening, "having raked the ashes over the fire; and for this purpose a sign should be made through every village, which is even now preserved, and called in the Norman, _cover-feu_." Mr. Hutchinson, in his "History of Durham," speaks of the curfew with great bitterness: he says that William "under severe penalties, prohibited the use of fire or candles when the curfew bell should ring, to prevent associations and conspiracies. This bell was heard by the English as the knell of their departed liberty, and a repeated testimony of slavery." We learn from Du Cange, that the ringing of the _couvre-feu_, _ignitegium_, or _peritegium_ bell, as it was called in mediaeval low Latin, prevailed generally in Europe during the Middle Ages as a precaution against fire; and this fact is alone sufficient to justify William in reviving and extending the law in this country.