by 223,120 the number during the corresponding weeks of last year, and by 705,939 the numbers for the same four weeks of 1839. (MORNING HERALD.)

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LUNATICS IN ENGLAND. Mr. Porter, in an analysis of the Census, states that in all Great Britain there are 13,000 idiots, lunatics, &c., and in England alone 1 in 500.

(MEDICO-CHIRURGICAL REVIEW.)

70 1.

RENT OF ENGLAND AND WALES. The rental of England and Wales is estimated by Mr. Mc. Culloch at the sum in round numbers of thirty millions sterling, which, however, appears to be a remarkable understatement of the actual amount; which by concurrent testimony, is at least forty millions.

(TIMES.)

Printed at the Office of the, Journal de St.-Petersbourg,»

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

No. IV.

THE ANGLO-NORMANS.

The Anglo-Saxon dominion in England endured for more than five centuries

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A territorial people had ceased to be roving invaders, but stood themselves in dread of the invasions of their own ancient brotherhood. They trembled on their own shores at those predatory hordes who might have reminded them of the lost valour of their own ancestors. But their warlike independence had passed away. And as a martial abbot declared of his country-men, they had taken their swords from their sides and had laid them on the altar, where they had rusted, and their edges were now too dull for the field (').» They could not even protect the soil which they had conquered, and often wanted the courage to choose a king of their own race. Sometimes they stood ready to pay tribute to the Dane, and sometimes suffered the throne to be occupied by a Da

(') Speed, 441. This was said to the Conqueror,» and this abbot of St. Alban's paid dearly for the patriotism which had then become treason.

VOL. I.

48

nish monarch. In a state of semi-civilisation their rude luxury hardly veiled their unintellectual character. Feeble sovereigns and a submissive people could not advance into national greatness.

When the Duke of Normandy visited his friend and kinsman, Edward the Confessor, he beheld in England a mimetic Normandy; Norman favourites were courtiers, and Norman soldiers were seen in Saxon castles, Edward, long estranged from his native realm, had received his education in Normandy; and the English court affected to imitate the domestic habits of these French neighbours the great speaking the foreign idiom in their houses, and writing in French their bills and accounts ('). Already there was a faction of frenchified Saxons in the court of the unnational English Sovereign.

William the Norman surveyed an empire already half Norman, and in the prospect, with his accustomed fore-sight, he mused on a doubtful succession. A people who had often suffered themselves to fall the prey of their hardier neighbours, lay open for conquest to a more intelligent and polished race.

The victory of Hastings did not necessarily include the conquest of the people, and William still condescended to march to the throne under the shadow of a title. After a short residence of only three months in his newly-acquired realm, "the Conqueror withdrew into his duchy, and there passed a long interval of nine months. William left many an unyielding Saxon; a spirit of resistance,, however suppressed, bound men together, and partial insurrections seemed to be pushing on a crisis which might have reversed the conquest of England (2).

(') A circumstance which Milton has recorded.

(2) Our great lawyers probably imagined that the honour of the country is implicated in the title usually accorded to William the Norman; Spelman, the great antiquary, and Blackstone, the historian and the expounder of our laws, have absolutely explained away the assumed title of the Conqueror, to the more technical feudal term of «Conquestor, or acquirer of any estate out of the common course of inheritance. The first purchaser (that is, he who brought the estate into the family which at present owns it) was styled the Conqueror,» and such is still the proper

During this mysterious and protracted visit, and, apparent abandonment of his new kingdom to the care of others, was a vast scheme of dominion nursed in the councils of the Norman nobles, and strengthened by the boundless devotion of hardy adventurers, who were all to share in the present spoliation and the future royalty? In his prescient view did William there anticipate a conquest of long labour and of distant days; the state, the nobles, the ecclesiastics, the people, the land and the language, all to be changed? Hume has ventured to surmise that the mind of the Norman laboured with this gigantic fabric of dominion. It is probable however, that this child of a novel policy was submitted to a more natural gestation, and expanded as circumstances favoured its awful growth. One night in December the King suddenly appeared in England, and soon unlimited confiscations and royal grants apportioned the land of the Saxons among the lords of Normandy, and even their lance-bearers. It seemed as if every new-comer brought his castles with him, so rapidly did castles cover the soil (1). These were strong-holds for the tyrant

phrase in the law of Scotland. rensic quibble.»

Ritson is indignant at what he calls a pitiful fo

But another great lawyer and lord chancellor, the sedate Whitelocke, positively asserts that William only conquered Harold and bis army, for he never was, nor pretended to be, the conqueror of England, although the sycophant monks of the time gave him that title.»-Whitelocke's Hist. of England, 33.

In a charter, granting certain lands for the church of St. Paul's, which Stowe has translated from the record in the Tower, William denominates himself, «by the grace of God, King of Englishmen (Rex Anglorum) and addresses it «to all his beloved French and English People, greeting.»-Stowe's Survey of London 326. Edit. 1603. Did William on any occasion declare that he was the Conqueror» as well as the Sovereign of England? When William attempted to learn the Saxon language, it is obvious that he did not desire to remind his new subjects that he ruled as Voltaire sung of his hero,

--qui régna sur la France

Par droit de conquête et par droit de naissance.

() The final history of these citadels may illustrate that verse of Goldsmith which reminds us

To fly from Petty Tyrants-to the Throne,>>

In the short space of seventy years the owners of those castles bearded even majesty itself; these lords, by their undue share of power, were in perpetual revolt; till two royal persons, though opposed to each other, Stephen and Maude, decreed for their

foreigner, or open retreats for his predatory bands; stern overlookers were they of the land!

The Norman lords had courts of their own; sworn vassals to their suzerain, but kinglings to the people. Sometimes they beheld a Saxon lord, whose heart could not tear itself from the lands of his race, a serf on his own soil; but they witnessed without remorse the rights of the sword. Norman prelates were silently substituted for Saxon ecclesiastics, and whole companies of claimants arrived to steal into benefices or rush into abbeys. It was sufficient to be a foreigner and land in England, to become bishop or abbot. Church and State were now indissolubly joined, for in the general plunder each took their orderly rank. It was the triumph of an enlightened, perhaps a cunning race, as the Norman has been proverbially commemorated, over « a rustic and almost an illiterate generation," as the simplicity of our Saxon prelates, who could not always speak French, is described by Ordericus Vitalis, a monk who, long absent from England, wrote in Normandy. Ingulphus, the monk of Croyland, though partial to the Conqueror, however, honestly confesses that when driven from their dignities, their successors were not always their superiors.

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All who were eager to court their new lords were brought to dissemble their native rusticity. They polled their crowns, they cut short their flowing hair, and throwing aside their loose Saxon gown, they assumed the close vest of the more agile Norman. «Mail of iron and coats of steel would have better become them," cried an indignant Saxon. We have

mutual interest the demolition of fifteen hundred and fifteen castles. They were razed by commission, or by writs of the sheriffs; and a law was further enacted that «none hereafter, without licence, should embattle his house,» And thus was broken this aristocracy of castles. See two dissertations on «Castles,» by Sir Robert Sutton, and by Agard; Curious Discourses by eminent Antiquaries I. 104 and 188.

This number of Castles seems incredible, possibly many were «embattled houses.» My learned friend the Rev. Joseph Hunter, an antiqnery most versant in manuscripts; inclines to think there may be some scriptural error of the ancient scribe, who was likely to add or to leave out a cipher, without much comprehension of the numerals he was transcribing without a thought, like what happened to the eleven thousand virgins of St. Ursula.