The night before the battle seems to us, and must even have seemed to the opposing armies, a tremendously fateful interlude. Political and other considerations were such that all must have known the fate of England to depend, not upon a long campaign and a series of marches and fights, but solely upon the issue of the great contest now impending. How, then, did they pass the eve of battle? The Normans are our chief, and almost sole, authorities here, and were concerned, as inevitably they would be, to picture the Norman army as a host of Christian soldiers going forth to war with a dissolute, drink-sodden rabble. According to this partisan view, the Battle of Senlac, or Hastings, was lost by the English chiefly owing to the effects upon them of an all-night orgie of wassailing. When morning came, and with it the great struggle that was to decide the fate of England, the English host were still muzzy with their potations of the night before, and had not the clear vision and cool judgment that are as necessary on the battlefield as elsewhere. What a fine theme for a Temperance Lecturer, hot on the subject of “the cursed drink”! Such an one might fitly show by this instance how indulgence in it destroys not only the individual but the nation itself; but no one seems ever to have fastened upon this very eloquent illustration. The Saxons certainly were mighty topers, and it is by no means too much to say that they were a nation of drunkards. Ancient chroniclers at all points fully support this sweeping statement; amongst them William of Malmesbury, who tells us that the Anglo-Saxon rule was bad, and the monks and nobility corrupt. “Drinking in parties,” he says, “was an universal practice, in which occupation they passed entire nights, as well as days.” Coming to a description of the night before the battle, he tells us, in the original Latin in which he wrote: “Angli, ut accepimus, totam noctem insomnem cantibus potibusque ducentes.” That is to say, in plain English, they kept awake all night, singing, and drinking innumerable drinks—which is a very fine, fearless way of preparing to meet the foe, and one highly expressive of contempt for him; but it is not a wise way. He then proceeds to expand his argument by saying: “The vices attendant on drunkenness which enervate the human mind followed; hence it arose that, engaging William more with rashness and precipitate fury than military skill, they doomed themselves and their country to slavery by one, and that an easy, victory.” XLI