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"Paradise Lost," one thousand years later, was but the echo of this poet-peasant, who was the Milton of the 7th Century.

In the 8th Century, Baeda , another Northumbrian, who was monk, scholar, and writer, wrote the first History of his people and his country, and discoursed upon astronomy, physics, meteorology, medicine, and philosophy. These were but the early lispings of Science; but they held the germs of the "British Association" and of the "Royal Society;" for as English poetry has its roots in Caedmon, so is English intellectual life rooted in Baeda.

The culmination of this new era was in Alfred, who came to the throne of his grandfather, Egbert, in 871.

He brought the highest ideals of the duties of a King, a broad, statesmanlike grasp of conditions, an unsullied heart, and a clear, strong intelligence, with unusual inclination toward an intellectual life.

Few Kings have better deserved the title of "great." With him began the first conception of National law. He prepared a code for the administration of justice in his Kingdom, which was prefaced by the Ten Commandments, and ended with the Golden Rule; while in his leisure hours he gave coherence and form to the literature of the time. Taking the writings of Caedmon, Baeda, Pope Gregory, and Boethius; translating, editing, commentating, and adding his own to the views of others upon a wide range of subjects.

He was indeed the father not alone of a legal system in England, but of her culture and literature besides. The people of Wantage, his native town, did well, in 1849, to celebrate the one-thousandth anniversary of the birth of the great King Alfred.

But a condition of decadence was in progress in England, which Alfred's wise reign was powerless to arrest, and which his greatness may even have tended to hasten. The distance between the king and the people had widened from a mere step to a gulf. When the Saxon kings began to be clothed with a mysterious dignity as "the Lord's anointed," the people were correspondingly degraded; and the degradation of this class, in which the true strength of England consisted, bore unhappy but natural fruits.

A slave or "unfree" class had come with the Teutons from their native land. This small element had for centuries now been swelled by captives taken in war, and by accessions through misery, poverty, and debt, which drove men to sell themselves and families and wear the collar of servitude. The slave was not under the lash; but he was a mere chattel, having no more part than cattle in the real life of the state.

In addition to this, political and social changes had been long modifying the structure of society in a way tending to degrade the general condition. As the lesser Kingdoms were merged into one large one, the wider dominion of the king removed him further from the people; every succeeding reign raising him higher, depressing them lower, until the old English freedom was lost.

The Northmen were a perpetual menace and scourge to England and Scotland. There never could be any feeling of permanent security while that hostile flood was always ready to press in through an unguarded spot on the coast. The sea wolves and robbers from Norway came devouring, pillaging, and ravaging, and then away again to their own homes or lairs. Their boast was that they "scorned to earn by sweat what they might win by blood." But the Northmen from Denmark were of a different sort. They were looking for permanent conquest, and had dreams of Empire, and, in fact, had had more or less of a grasp upon English soil for centuries before Alfred; and one of his greatest achievements was driving these hated invaders out of England. In 1013, under the leadership of Sweyn, they once more poured in upon the land, and after a brief but fierce struggle a degenerate England was gathered into the iron hand of the Dane.

Canute, the son of Sweyn, continued the successes of his father, conquering in Scotland Duncan , and proceeded to realize his dream of a great Scandinavian empire, which should include Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and England. He was one of those monumental men who mark the periods in the pages of History, and yet child enough to command the tides to cease, and when disobeyed, was so humiliated, it is said, he never again placed a crown upon his head, acknowledging the presence of a King greater than himself.

Conqueror though he was, the Dane was not exactly a foreigner in England. The languages of the two nations were almost the same, and a race affinity took away much of the bitterness of the subjugation, while Canute ruled more as a wise native King than as a Conqueror.

But the span of life, even of a founder of Empire, is short. Canute's sons were degenerate, cruel, and in forty years after the Conquest had so exasperated the Anglo-Saxons that enough of the primitive spirit returned, to throw off the foreign yoke, and the old Saxon line was restored in Edward, known as "the Confessor."

Edward had qualities more fitted to adorn the cloister than the throne. He was more of a Saint than King, and was glad to leave the affairs of his realm in the hands of Earl Godwin. This man was the first great English statesman who had been neither Priest nor King. Astute, powerful, dexterous, he was virtual ruler of the Kingdom until the death of the childless King Edward in 1066, when Godwin's son Harold was called to the empty throne.

Foreign royal alliances have caused no end of trouble in the life of Kingdoms. A marriage between a Saxon King and a Norman Princess, in about the year 1000 A.D., has made a vast deal of history. This Princess of Normandy, was the grandmother of the man, who was to be known as "William the Conqueror." In the absence of a direct heir to the English throne, made vacant by Edward's death, this descent gave a shadowy claim to the ambitious Duke across the Channel, which he was not slow to use for his own purposes.

He asserted that Edward had promised that he should succeed him, and that Harold, the son of Godwin, had assured him of his assistance in securing his rights upon the death of Edward the Confessor. A tremendous indignation stirred his righteous soul when he heard of the crowning of Harold; not so much at the loss of the throne, as at the treachery of his friend.

In the face of tremendous opposition and difficulties, he got together his reluctant Barons and a motley host, actually cutting down the trees with which to create a fleet, and then, depending upon pillage for subsistence, rushed to face victory or ruin.

The Battle of Senlac has been best told by a woman's hand in the famous Bayeux Tapestry. An arrow pierced the unhappy Harold in the eye, entering the brain, and the head which had worn the crown of England ten short months lay in the dust, William, with wrath unappeased, refusing him burial.

William, Duke of Normandy, was King of England. Not alone that. He claimed that he had been rightful King ever since the death of his cousin Edward the Confessor; and that those who had supported Harold were traitors, and their lands confiscated to the crown. As nearly all had been loyal to Harold, the result was that most of the wealth of the Nation was emptied into William's lap, not by right of conquest, but by English law.

The City of London was rewarded for instant submission by a Charter, signed,--not by his name--but his mark, for the Conqueror of England , could not write his name.

He built the Tower of London, to hold the City in restraint. Fortress, palace, prison, it stands to-day the grim progenitor of the Castles and Strongholds which soon frowned from every height in England.

He took the outlawed, despised Jew under his protection; not as a philanthropist, but seeing in him a being who was always accumulating wealth, which could in any emergency be wrung from him by torture, if milder measures failed. Their hoarded treasure flowed into the land. They built the first stone houses, and domestic architecture was created. Jewish gold built Castles and Cathedrals, and awoke the slumbering sense of beauty. Through their connection with the Jews in Spain and the East, knowledge of the physical sciences also streamed into the land, and an intellectual life was created, which bore fruit a century and a half later in Roger Bacon.

William typified in his person a transitional time, the old Norse world, mingling strangely in him with the new. He was the last outcome of his race. Norse daring and cruelty were side by side with gentleness and aspiration. No human pity tempered his vengeance. When hides were hung on the City Walls at Alen?on, in insult to his mother , he tore out the eyes, cut off the hands and feet of the prisoners, and threw them over the walls. When he did this, and when he refused Harold's body a grave, it was the spirit of the sea-wolves within him. But it was the man of the coming Civilization, who could not endure death by process of law in his Kingdom, and who delighted to discourse with the gentle and pious Anselm, upon the mysteries of life and death.

This engrafting with the results of antiquity, was an enormous saving of time, in the development of a nation; but it did not change the essential character of the Anglo-Saxon, nor of his speech. The ravenous Teuton could devour and assimilate all these new elements and remain essentially unchanged. The language of Bunyan and of the Bible is Saxon; and it is the language of the Englishman to-day in childhood and in extremity. A man who is thoroughly in earnest--who is drowning--speaks Saxon. Character, as much as speech, remains unaltered. There is small trace of the Norman in the House of Commons, or in the meetings at Exeter Hall, or in the home, or life of the people anywhere.

The qualities which have made England great were brought across the North Sea in those "keels" in the 5th Century. The Anglo-Saxon put on the new civilization and institutions brought him by the Conquest, as he would an embroidered garment; but the man within the garment, though modified by civilization, has never essentially changed.

It is not in the exploits of its Kings but in the aspirations and struggles of its people, that the true history of a nation is to be sought. During the rule and misrule of the two sons, and grandson, of the Conqueror, England was steadily growing toward its ultimate form.

As Society outgrew the simple ties of blood which bound it together in old Saxon England, the people had sought a larger protection in combinations among fellow freemen, based upon identity of occupation.

It was in the "boroughs" and in these "gilds" that the true life of the nation consisted. It was the shopkeepers and artisans which brought the right of free speech, and free meeting, and of equal justice across the ages of tyranny. One freedom after another was being won, and the battle with oppression was being fought, not by Knights and Barons, but by the sturdy burghers and craftsmen. Silently as the coral insect, the Anglo-Saxon was building an indestructible foundation for English liberties.

The Conqueror had bequeathed England to his second son, William Rufus, and Normandy to his eldest son, Robert. In 1095 commenced those extraordinary wars carried on by the chivalry of Europe against the Saracens in the East. Robert, in order to raise money to join the first crusade, mortgaged Normandy to his brother, and an absorption of Western France had begun, which, by means of conquest by arms and the more peaceful conquest by marriage, would in fifty years extend English dominion from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees.

William's son Henry , who succeeded his older brother, William Rufus, inherited enough of his father's administrative genius to complete the details of government which he had outlined. He organized the beginning of a judicial system, creating out of his secretaries and Royal Ministers a Supreme Court, whose head bore the title of Chancellor. He created also another tribunal, which represented the body of royal vassals who had all hitherto been summoned together three times a year. This "King's Court," as it was called, considered everything relating to the revenues of the state. Its meetings were about a table with a top like a chessboard, which led to calling the members who sat, "Barons of the Exchequer." He also wisely created a class of lesser nobles, upon whom the old barons looked down with scorn, but who served as a counterbalancing force against the arrogance of an old nobility, and bridged the distance between them and the people.

So, while the thirty-five years of Henry's reign advanced, and developed the purposes of his father, his marriage with a Saxon Princess did much to efface the memory of foreign conquest, in restoring the old Saxon blood to the royal line. But the young Prince who embodied this hope, went down with 140 young nobles in the "White Ship," while returning from Normandy. It is said that his father never smiled again, and upon his death, his nephew Stephen was king during twenty unfruitful years.

This first Plantagenet was a strong, coarse-fibred man; a practical reformer, without sentiment, but really having good government profoundly at heart.

He took the reins into his great, rough hands with a determination first of all to curb the growing power of the clergy, by bringing it under the jurisdiction of the civil courts. To this end he created his friend and chancellor, Thomas ? Becket, a primate of the Church to aid the accomplishment of his purpose. But from the moment Becket became Archbishop of Canterbury, he was transformed into the defender of the organization he was intended to subdue. Henry was furious when he found himself resisted and confronted by the very man he had created as an instrument of his will. These were years of conflict. At last, in a moment of exasperation, the king exclaimed, "Is there none brave enough to rid me of this low-born priest!" This was construed into a command. Four knights sped swiftly to Canterbury Cathedral, and murdered the Archbishop at the altar. Henry was stricken with remorse, and caused himself to be beaten with rods like the vilest criminal, kneeling upon the spot stained with the blood of his friend. It was a brutal murder, which caused a thrill of horror throughout Christendom. Becket was canonized; miracles were performed at his tomb, and for hundreds of years a stream of bruised humanity flowed into Canterbury, seeking surcease of sorrow, and cure for sickness and disease, by contact with the bones of the murdered saint.

But of all the blows aimed at the barons none told more effectually than the restoration of a national militia, which freed the crown from dependence upon feudal retainers for military service.

In a fierce quarrel between two Irish chieftains, Henry was called upon to interfere; and when the quarrel was adjusted, Ireland found herself annexed to the English crown, and ruled by a viceroy appointed by the king. The drama of the Saxons defending the Britons from the Picts and Scots, was repeated.

This first Plantagenet, with fiery face, bull-neck, bowed legs, keen, rough, obstinate, passionate, left England greater and freer, and yet with more of a personal despotism than he had found her. The trouble with such triumphs is that they presuppose the wisdom and goodness of succeeding tyrants.

Henry's heart broke when he learned that his favorite son, John, was conspiring against him. He turned his face to the wall and died , the practical hard-headed old king leaving his throne to a romantic dreamer, who could not even speak the language of his country.

Richard was a hero of romance, but not of history. The practical concerns of his kingdom had no charm for him. His eye was fixed upon Jerusalem, not England, and he spent almost the entire ten years of his reign in the Holy Land.

The Crusades, had fired the old spirit of Norse adventure left by the Danes, and England shared the general madness of the time. As a result for the treasure spent and blood spilled in Palestine, she received a few architectural devices and the science of Heraldry. But to Europe, the benefits were incalculable. The barons were impoverished, their great estates mortgaged to thrifty burghers, who extorted from their poverty charters of freedom, which unlocked the fetters and broke the spell of the dark ages.

Richard the Lion-Hearted died as he had lived, not as a king, but as a romantic adventurer. He was shot by an arrow while trying to secure fabulous hidden treasure in France, with which to continue his wars in Palestine.

His brother John, in 1199, ascended the throne. His name has come down as a type of baseness, cruelty, and treachery. His brother Geoffrey had married Constance of Brittany, and their son Arthur, named after the Keltic hero, had been urged as a rival claimant for the English throne. Shakespeare has not exaggerated the cruel fate of this boy, whose monstrous uncle really purposed having his eyes burnt out, being sure that if he were blind he would no longer be eligible for king. But death is surer even than blindness, and Hubert, his merciful protector from one fate, was powerless to avert the other. Some one was found with "heart as hard as hammered iron," who put an end to the young life at the Castle of Rouen.

But the King of England, was vassal to the King of France, and Philip summoned John to account to him for this deed. When John refused to appear, the French provinces were torn from him. In 1204 he saw an Empire stretching from the English Channel to the Pyrenees vanish from his grasp, and was at one blow reduced to the realm of England.

When we see on the map, England as she was in that day, sprawling in unwieldy fashion over the western half of France, we realize how much stronger she has been on "that snug little island, that right little, tight little island," and we can see that John's wickedness helped her to be invincible.

The destinies of England in fact rested with her worst king. His tyranny, brutality, and disregard of his subjects' rights, induced a crisis which laid the corner-stone of England's future, and buttressed her liberties for all time.

At a similar crisis in France, two centuries later, the king made common cause with the people against the barons or dukes. In England, in the 13th Century, the barons and people were drawn together against the King. They framed a Charter, its provisions securing protection and justice to every freeman in England. On Easter Day, 1215, the barons, attended by two thousand armed knights, met the King near Oxford, and demanded his signature to the paper. John was awed, and asked them to name a day and place. "Let the day be the 15th of June, and the place Runnymede," was the reply.

It is an impressive picture we get of John, "the Lord's Anointed," when this scene was over, in a burst of rage rolling on the floor, biting straw, and gnawing a stick! "They have placed twenty-five kings over me," he shouted in a fury; meaning the twenty-five barons who were entrusted with the duty of seeing that the provisions of the Charter were fulfilled.

Whether his death, one year later , was the result of vexation of spirit or surfeit of peaches and cider, or poison, history does not positively say. But England shed no tears for the King to whom she owes her liberties in the Magna Charta.

Paris at this time was the centre of a great intellectual revival, brought about by the Crusades. We have seen that through the despised Jew, at the time of the Conquest, a higher civilization was brought into England. Along with his hoarded gold came knowledge and culture, which he had obtained from the Saracen. Now, these germs had been revived by direct contact with the sources of ancient knowledge in the East during the Crusades; and while the long mental torpor of Europe was rolling away like mist before the rising sun, England felt the warmth of the same quickening rays, and Oxford took on a new life.

It was not the stately Oxford of to-day, but a rabble of roystering, revelling youths, English, Welsh, and Scotch, who fiercely fought out their fathers' feuds.

They were a turbulent mob, who gave advance opinion, as it were, upon every ecclesiastical or political measure, by fighting it out on the streets of their town, so that an outbreak at Oxford became a sort of prelude to every great political movement.

Impossible as it seems, intellectual life grew and expanded in this tumultuous atmosphere; and while the democratic spirit of the University threatened the king, its spirit of free intellectual inquiry shook the Church.

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