THE ELECTION OF HAROLD.[1] January 5th–April 16th, 1066

The central stage of our journey is now reached. We are now on the threshold of the great year, of that year whose effects on all later English, on all later European, history can never be wiped out. No one year in later English history can for a moment compare, in lasting importance, with the year which, with some small exaggeration, we may call the year of the Norman Conquest. |No later time in which one year and one day stand out in the same way.| There have indeed been later periods in our history which have been as memorable in their results as the invasion of William itself. The events of the thirteenth, of the sixteenth, of the seventeenth century, are all fully entitled to be set side by side with the events of the eleventh. But in all these cases we have to set the work of a whole generation against the work of a single year. One age is famous for the great struggle against alien domination, and for the final establishment of English freedom in its later form. Another age gave us all the results, for good and for evil, of the great Reformation of religion. A third age confirmed on a surer and more lasting basis those political rights which the thirteenth century had won back, but which the fifteenth and sixteenth had once more brought into jeopardy. But, in all these great periods of change, the work was gradual; there is no single moment, no single year, on which we can place our finger as the moment or the year when the work was actually done. In the eleventh century the work was gradual also. A long series of events prepared the way for William’s enterprise, and, when he began his work, it needed more than a single day or a single year to put him in full possession of the Empire for which he had yearned so long. Still in the eleventh century there is a single year and a single day which stand forth in a way in which no single day or year stands forth in the ages after them. There is no later year to compare to the year in which the Crown of England was worn by the last King of the old sacred and immemorial stock, by the first and last King who reigned purely because he was the best and bravest among his people, and by the first and last King who could boast that he held his Kingdom purely of God and his own sword. There is no one day in later times to compare to that memorable morning when Northern and Southern Europe, when England and Normandy, when Harold and William, met face to face in the great wager of battle on the day of Saint Calixtus. For days of equal moment in our history we must go back to far earlier times, to times which are still half shrouded in the mist of legend. For a day like the day when England bowed to her first purely foreign lord, we must go back to the day when the first Englishman was baptized into the faith of Christ, to the day when the first Englishman set foot on the shores of Britain.