William himself was anxious to be regarded not as a conqueror, but as reigning by inheritence from the Confessor. For this cause, when Matilda was crowned, he caused a Norman baron, Marmion of Fontenaye, to ride into the midst of Westminster Hall, and, throwing down his gauntlet, defy any man to single combat who denied the rights of William and Matilda. He himself took the old coronation oath drawn up by St. Dunstan, and pledged himself to execute justice according to the old laws of Alfred and Edward.
But William, whatever might be his own good intentions, was pressed by circumstances. He had lured his Normans across the channel with hopes of rich plunder in England, and knight and squire, man-at-arms and archer, were eager for their reward. Norman, Breton, Angevin, clamored for possession: families of peasants crossed the sea, expecting, in right of their French tongue, to be gentry at once, and lords of the churl Saxons; while the Saxons, fully conscious of their own nobility, and possessors of the soil for five hundred years, derided them in such rhymes as these:
“William de Coningsby Came out of Brittany With his wife Tiffany, And his maid Manfas, And his dog Hardigras.”
But the laugh proved to be on the side of the new comers, and the Saxon, whether Earl, Thane, Franklin, or Ceorl, though he could trace his line up to Odin, and had held his land since Hengist first won Thanet, must give place to Hardigras and his master. And though our sympathies are all with the dispossessed Saxons, and the Normans appear as needy and rapacious spoilers, there is no cause for us to lament their coming. Without the Norman aristocracy, and the high spirit of chivalry and adventure thus infused, England could scarcely have attained her greatness; for, though many great men had existed among the unmixed Anglo-Saxon race, they had never been able to rouse the nation from the heavy, dull, stolid sensuality into which, to this day, an uncultivated Englishman is liable to fall.
One Norman, the gallant Gilbert Fitz-Richard, deserves to be remembered as an exception to the grasping temper of his countrymen. He would accept neither gold nor lands for the services he had rendered at Hastings. He said he had come in obedience to the summons of his feudal chief, and not for spoil, and, now his term of service was at an end, he would go back to his own inheritance, with which he was content, without the plunder of the widow and orphan.