Still, although well-nigh a century had elapsed since the Norman Conquest, and the heir of the Conqueror in the fourth generation was sitting on the throne which that great and politic prince won on the fatal day of Hastings, their condition had not become habitual or easy to those, at least, who had been reduced to slavery from freedom, by the consequences of that disastrous battle. And such was the condition of the family whence sprang Kenric and Edith. The Saxon thane, Waltheof, whose name and that of his abode had descended to the Norman fortalice which had arisen from the ashes of his less aspiring manor, had resisted the Norman invaders so long, with such inveterate and stubborn valor, and, through the devotion of his tenants and followers, with such cost of life, that when he fell in fight, and his possessions were granted to his slayer, all the dwellers on his lands were involved in the common ruin. To the serfs of the soil, who had been serfs before the conquest, it mattered but little. The slave to the Saxon was but changed into the slave of the Norman, and did not perhaps find in him a crueller, though he might a haughtier and more overbearing master. But to the freeman, the doom which consigned him to the fetters of the Norman, which converted him from the owner into the serf of the soil, was second only, if second, to the bitterness of death. And such had been the doom of the grandfather of Kenric and Eadwulf. Their mother herself had been born free, not far from the hovel in which she still dwelt a slave, though she was but an infant when the hurricane of war and ruin swept over the green oaks of Sherwood, and had no memory of the time when she was not the thrall of a foreign lord. Her father, Wulfred, was the largest tenant under Waltheof, himself a franklin, or small landholder, and of blood as noble, and station more elevated than that of one half the adventurers who had flocked to the banner of William the invader. With his landlord and friend, he had fought to the last, not at Hastings only, but in every bloody ineffectual rising, until the last spark of Saxon liberty was trampled out under the iron hoofs of the Norman war-horse; but, less happy than Waltheof, he had survived to find himself a slave, and the father of slaves, tilling for a cruel foreign conqueror the land which had been his own and his father's, and his father's father's, but in which he and his heirs should have no heritage for evermore, beyond the six-foot measure which should be meted to them every one, for his long home. And the memory of these things had not yet passed away, nor the bitterness of the iron departed from the children, which had then entered into the soul of the parent.