|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: freeman) was crushed out in this island by the two Norman conquests-
-that of the Anglo-Saxon nobility by Sweyn and Canute; and that of
the Anglo-Danish nobility by William and his Frenchmen. Those two
terrible calamities, following each other in the short space of
fifty years, seem to have welded together, by a community of
suffering, all ranks and races, at least south of the Tweed; and
when the English rose after the storm, they rose as one homogeneous
people, never to be governed again by an originally alien race. The
English nobility were, from the time of Magna Charta, rather an
official nobility, than, as in most continental countries, a
separate caste; and whatever caste tendencies had developed
|
