SONNET.

DEPLORABLE his lot who tills the ground,
His whole life long tills it, with heartless toil
Of villein-service, passing with the soil
To each new master, like a steer or hound,
Or like a rooted tree, or stone earth-bound!
But mark how gladly through their own domains,
The monks relax or break these iron chains;
While Mercy, uttering, through their voice, a sound
Echoed in Heaven, cries out, "Ye chiefs, abate
These legalized oppressions! Man, whose name
And nature God disdained not; Man, whose soul
Christ died for, cannot forfeit his high claim
To live and move exempt from all control,
Which fellow-feeling doth not mitigate!"

THE Norman conquerors of England were rapidly absorbed by the conquered people; and the union of the two races took place at a period much earlier than has generally been stated by our historians. Though beaten in the field, after a long and stern struggle for their independence, and though perhaps decimated by seven dreadful years of war and carnage, the Saxons remained incomparably more numerous than their invaders, and it was considered an easier and a wiser task to conciliate them than to exterminate them. From his first coming into England, and, indeed, before his arrival, William the Conqueror had a strong party among the Saxon and Dano-Saxon thanes; this party rejoiced at his coming, and grew in numbers and strength after the battle of Hastings. To keep it steady to his interest, William at a very early period began to give these great thanes Norman wives.

Thus

Several of these brides were of the highest rank. the Conqueror gave his own niece Judith in marriage to the great Saxon Earl Waltheof, whose warlike qualities and great popularity with the Saxon people, might have made him formidable as an enemy many years after the catastrophe

at Hastings. William even promised one of his own daughters to Edwin Earl of Mercia, brother-in-law to the late King Harold; and it appears that this marriage would have taken place, if suspicions had not been excited by the conduct of Edwin, who soon after fled from the Conqueror's court to put himself at the head of a formidable insurrection in the north country. Other young maidens from beyond sea, sisters or daughters to some of the noblest of the Conqueror's followers, were affianced to the sons of rich Saxons, who had hoped to preserve their wealth by remaining quiet.

But the more frequent intermarriages among the chiefs of the two nations were those in which Norman barons and knights espoused Saxon heiresses. The fathers and brothers of many noble thanes, and of many great holders of land, perished in battle, either at Hastings or in the course of the seven-years' war which followed that event; and by the ordinary dispositions of nature there was many a rich Saxon family that had daughters and no sons. By right of his feudal supremacy and kingly prerogative, William became guardian to all these Saxons orphans, and disposed of their lands and fortunes as he chose; and over such heiresses as were not orphans he could exercise a control through their peace-seeking fathers. It was better to please the Saxon people by marrying these heiresses to his barons and knights, than to keep up a constant exasperation by forcibly seizing and giving away their estates; and it should appear, in spite of the frequent bravadoes about the rights of conquest, that the Norman chiefs considered the best rights to such estates, or the title least likely to be questioned, to be the lands of the Saxon heiresses whose ancestors had held them for ages.

It is mentioned by several of the chroniclers, who were either contemporary or lived near the time, that many of the Norman and foreign adventurers who made part of William's first army of invasion, made no other bargain with him than that they should be married to Saxon heiresses, or to other rich young women in England. These chroniclers could not be expected to record all the marriages which took place between the two races (such a piece of family history would throw great light upon an important part of our national history), but they mention cases enough to prove the frequency of such alliances, and they speak of them as a fixed principle in the Conqueror's polity. In one generation the children proceeding from these marriages were numerous, and in these children the distinction between Norman and Saxon was already lost.

But other far and more numerous intermarriages took place

among those classes that were too poor or obscure to attract the notice of King William's historians. The home-marriage market was thinned by the long wars in the south and the north, the cast and the west. The young Saxon women were fair and florid, and the young soldiers and camp-followers that came from Normandy and other parts of France seldom, if ever, brought wives with them. The circumstances and natural feelings of these parties would be decisive of the matter; but, no doubt, it would enter into the policy of the Conqueror to keep these young soldiers (many of whom were not his subjects) in England, and in his own service, by encouraging and promoting their marriages with the unprovided Saxon maidens. Although not specially mentioned by the monkish writers, the only annalists of those times, we can glean incidentally that these matches became very common shortly after the battle of Hastings, that they continued throughout the long war, and that they became still more frequent when the Conqueror crushed the last insurrection in the country of Trent, and finally subdued the Saxon spirit of independence. And these marriages among the commonalty contributed more than any other single cause to the disarming of the mutual animosities, and to the tranquillizing of the kingdom.

William of Poictiers, the Conqueror's chaplain and chronicler, who is believed to have accompanied his hero and patron on his expedition to England, speaks with something like rapture of the beauty of countenance, the fair complexion, and long flowing hair of the Saxons. There is, however, no good reason to doubt the long-established opinion, that physically, as well as morally, the fusion of new brisk blood in the great but somewhat sluggish Anglo-Saxon stream was highly advantageous. If the Northmen, or Normans, had achieved the conquest of England on their first starting from Norway and the other shores of the North Sea, they would have differed very little in race or breed from the Saxons and Danes; but during the century and a half or more that these Scandinavian followers of Rollo had been settled in the northwest of France, or in those regions to which they imparted the name of Normandy, they had been greatly intermixed with Frankish and Celtic and other blood; their princes and chiefs intermarried with royal or noble Franks, their followers with the common people of the country or of the estates adjacent to it.

Hence black hair and black eyes, and hands and feet of comparatively small size, were common among the real Normaus who first came to England with the Conqueror, and long before that event the Normans had entirely lost their original Scandi

;

navian language, and spoke nothing but a dialect of the French as afterwards in England the mixed race lost the use of the French language, and spoke nothing but English. If it took a longer time in England than it had taken in France to identify the language of the conquerors with the conquered, and if a good deal of the French dialect the Normans brought with them into England was fused and mixed with the staple of the growing English language, it was certainly not owing to the slow mixture of the two races, but to other powerful causes, such as the close and long- continued connection between England and Normandy and the adjacent countries, the infant and transition state of our language at the time of the conquest, the somewhat inore advanced state of language and civilization in France, the great influx of foreign churchmen, and the tendency of the Latin (the language of the church) to promote the use of words that sprung from Latin roots, and that were taken from dialects which were but derivatives of the Latin.

When Rollo obtained an undisturbed possession of his duchy in Normandy, he retained no dominion elsewhere, and he appears to have given up almost immediately every connection with the country from which he had come; but the Conqueror and his descendants retained possession of Normandy and of other French-speaking states for more than one hundred and sixty years; and during all this period our kings were frequently on the Continent for long periods at a time, and many of our barons held fiefs in Normandy, Maine and Anjou, as well as in England, and passed a portion of their time in their castles abroad. Even after this period, or when King John and Henry III. had lost nearly every foot of territory in France, there was an intimate connection between the two people on the opposite sides of the channel, and the conquests contemplated by Edward I., and achieved by Edward III., contributed to keep alive the use of the French language in England, and to engraft so much of it upon the Anglo-Saxon stock.

But, besides the real Normans, or the men of mixed race who came over with the Conqueror, there were numerous adventurers from other parts of the Continent that came with the first expedition, or that repaired to his standard afterwards; for during the seven years' war he was frequently hard pressed by the Saxons, and compelled to bring over numerous bodies of recruits. In the first expedition there were men that came from Maine and Anjou, from Poictou and Bretagne, from central France and from southern France, from Burgundy and from Aquitaine; and to these were added volunteers and soldiers of fortune from the great plains of Italy at the foot of the Alps. All this enlarged

and varied, and no doubt advantageously, the new blood which was mixed with the Anglo-Saxon. Of these more southern adventurers, many who had brought little else with them than a suit of chain armour, a lance, and a few hungry and bold followers, attained to high rank and command, married Saxon women, and became the founders of noble families.- Penny Magazine.'

Culprits.
Technical.

THE ACQUITTAL OF THE BISHOPS.

Altercation.
Prerogative.

Acclamations.
Publication.

Explosion.
Overmatched.

IT was dark before the jury retired to consider of their verdict.' The night was a night of intense anxiety. Some letters are extant which were despatched during that period of suspense, and which have therefore an interest of a peculiar kind. "It is very late," wrote the Papal Nuncio,2" and the decision is not yet known. The judges and the culprits have gone to their own homes. The jury remain together. To-morrow we shall learn the event of this great struggle."

The solicitor for the bishops sat up all night with a body of servants on the stairs leading to the room where the jury was consulting. It was absolutely necessary to watch the officers who watched the doors; for those officers were supposed to be in the interest of the crown, and might, if not carefully observed, have furnished a courtly juryman with food, which would have enabled him to starve out the other eleven. Strict guard was therefore kept. Not even a candle to light a pipe was permitted to enter. Some basins of water for washing were suffered to pass at about four in the morning. The jurymen, raging with thirst, soon lapped up the whole. Great numbers of people walked the neighbouring streets till dawn. Every hour a messenger came from Whitehall to know what was passing. Voices, high in altercation, were repeatedly heard within the room; but nothing certain was known.

At first, nine were for acquitting and three for convicting. Two of the minority soon gave way, but Arnold was obstinate. Thomas Austin, a country gentleman of great estate, who had paid close attention to the evidence and speeches, and had taken full notes, wished to argue the question. Arnold declined. He was not used, he doggedly said, to reasoning and debating. His conscience was not satisfied, and he should not acquit the bishops. "If you come to that " said Austin," look at me; I am the largest and