It must be taken now into consideration by those who listen with dismay and wonder to the accounts of pitiless barbarity--of ruthless, indiscriminating slaughter on the part of men whom they have hitherto been taught to look upon as brave indeed as lions in the field, but not partaking of the lion’s nature after the field was won--not only that the seeds of enmity had long been sown between those rival people, but that the deadly crop of hatred had grown up, watered abundantly by the tears and blood of either; and, lastly, that the fierce fanaticism of religious persecution was added to the natural rancor of a war waged for the ends of conquest or extermination. The Saxon nation, from the king downward to the meanest serf who fought beneath his banner, or buckled on the arms of liberty, were all involved under the common ban of the pope’s interdict. They were accursed of God, and handed over by his holy church to the kind mercies of the secular arm; and therefore, though but yesterday they were a powerful and united nation, to-day they were but a vile horde of scattered outlaws, whom any man might slay wherever he should find them, whether in arms or otherwise--amenable for blood neither to any mortal jurisdiction, nor even to the ultimate tribunal to which all must submit hereafter, unless deprived of their appeal like these poor fugitives, by excommunication from the pale of Christianity. For thirty miles around the Norman camp, pillars of smoke by day, continually streaming upward to the polluted heaven, and the red glare of nightly conflagration, told fatally the doom of many a happy home! Neither the castle nor the cottage might preserve their male inhabitants from the sword’s edge, their females from more barbarous persecution. Neither the sacred hearth of hospitality nor the more sacred altars of God’s churches might protect the miserable fugitives; neither the mail-shirt of the man-at-arms nor the monk’s frock of serge availed against the thrust of the fierce Norman spear. All was dismay and havoc, such as the land wherein those horrors were enacted has never witnessed since, through many a following age.