Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 51

[introduction]

William came over the sea,

With bloody sword came he.

Cold heart and bloody hand

Now rule the English land.

Snorro's Saga.

To realise in some degree the manifold calamities that royalty has heaped on the English people it is not necessary to go beyond the period of the Norman Conquest. The fatal year of Hastings, 1066, will ever remain the blackest in our annals. In that year sixty thousand of the greatest ruffians that could be collected not merely in Normandy, but in all Europe, crossed the Channel, and by sheer brute force possessed themselves of the land. They succeeded in garotting the entire English people, and to this day their descendants, or rather their pretended descendants, on the throne, in the peerage, and in the magistracy, keep a tight grip on the nation's throat. Conquests there have been before and since in the world's history, but never one with results so widely, so enduringly disastrous. The policy of the Norman robber is illustrated to-day not less by the misery and degradation of the Irish peasant, the Indian ryot, and the Egyptian fellah, than by the squalor of the East-end of London and the ruin of agricultural England.