"With grisly sound off go the great guns And heartily they crash in all at once, And from the top down come the great stones; In goes the grapnel so full of crooks, Among the ropes run the shearing hooks; And with the pole-axe presses one the other; Behind the mast begins one to take cover And out again, and overboard he driveth His foe, whose side his spear-head riveth. He rends the sail with hooks just like a scythe; He brings the cup, and bids his mate be blithe; He showers hard peas to make the hatches slippery. With pots full of lime they rush together; And thus the live-long day in fight they spend." Description of a mediæval sea fight, _Legend of Good Women_ (modernized), fifteenth century. WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR, like Cortez, the discoverer of Mexico at a later date, dispelled any thoughts of retreat that might have been lurking in the minds of his followers by destroying the ships which had brought them over. He had come to stay. Now the Normans, though of the same blood as the seafaring Vikings, who had sailed and fought their Dragon-ships to the very ends of the known earth, had been so long settled in France that they had adopted not only the French language, but French ideas, which were not, generally speaking, of a nautical nature. Among these was the system of feudalism and knight-service. The very word for knight--_chevalier_ in French--signified a horseman; and the Norman and other feudal knights of the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries looked at war and politics from the point of view of a cavalier armed cap-à-pie seated in his war-saddle. As for ships and sailors, they were merely unpleasant means to necessary ends.[4] But if one wanted to go to fight and plunder and raid across Channel he had to submit himself and his followers to the cramped accommodation of a vessel of some kind, and to the care of the rough shipmaster and his crew--low but necessary persons, in the eyes of the mediæval knight, just as were the experienced "tarpawlins" in the estimate of the scented "gentleman-captains" in the days of the Restoration. So it came about that for some centuries England had no Royal Navy.