A Short History of Anglo-Saxon Freedom; The Polity of the English-Speaking Race (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS. 1066. Thekb is a little patch of a square mile or so, in the midst of the rich Sussex landscape in England. Through it, in low ground, sluggishly Presentap. flows a small brook, and from the brook ?]"00/ ridges slope up gently on either hand. It Senlac- is covered for the most part with the green, thick English grass, dotted now and then by old elms and- oaks. A gray, half-ruined wall, toothed with battlements at the summit, runs along one verge of the field; and there are two or three old towers, forlorn, through desertion and decrepitude, as Lears, whose comforting Cordelias are masses of close-clinging ivy, ? wall and towers suggesting a splendor that has now departed. What happened there in October, 1066, decided some important things; for instance, that in the sentence that is now being written there should be nineteen words of Saxon origin and four of Latin; and that in general, when we write and talk, about a quarter of our speech should be derived from Rome, and three-quarters from the German forests. It was decided there, in fact, that those of us of English blood are what we are in mind and body, ? a cross, namely, between two tough stocks, each of whichcontributed precious qualities of brain and brawn to form a race which in the nineteenth century should stand so high. The field is that of Hastings, where the Normans under William beat the Saxons under Harold. Thence came a blending of tongues; thence a blending of traits ? on the one hand enterprise, on the other sturdy fortitude ? into a national character, too full of spring to break, too hard to be wasted, as carbon and iron blend together into steel. One day, at the end of September, I stood on the beach at Hastings, a watering-place of some fashion The beach at on t...