o swell the Norman host. Brittany supplied the largest number of such volunteers, and next to Brittany came Flanders, but the fame of William's expedition had spread beyond the Alps, and the Norman states in South Italy and Sicily sent their representatives.  And this composite character of the army which fought at Hastings had deep and abiding results. A hundred years after the Conquest, Henry II. will still be sending out writs addressed to his barons and lieges "French and English," and the terminology here expresses a fact of real importance. The line of racial distinction which was all-important in later eleventh-century England was not between Englishmen and Normans, but between Englishmen and Frenchmen. England fell, not before any province, however powerful, of the French kingdom, but, in effect, before the whole of French-speaking Europe, and, by her fall, she herself became part of that whole. For nearly a hundred years England had been oscillating between the French and the Scandinavian world ; the events of 1066 carried her finally within the influence of Southern ideas in religion, politics, and culture.
The French auxiliaries of William have often been described as adventurers, and adventurers in a sense no doubt they were. But the word should not be pressed so as to imply that they belonged to a social rank inferior either to their Norman associates or to the English thegnhood whom they were to displace, there should be no talk of "grooms and scullions from beyond the sea"  in this connection. Socially there was little to distinguish a knight or noble from Brittany or Picardy from Normans like Robert d'Oilly or Henry de Ferrers; nor, rude as their ideas of comfort and refinement must seem to us, have we any warrant for supposing that Wigod of Wallingford or Tochi the son of Outi had been in advance of either in this respect. Like the Normans themselves the Frenchmen varied indefinitely in point of origin. Some of them were the younger sons of great houses, some belonged to the lesser baronage, some to the greater; Count Eustace of Bologne might by courtesy be described as a reigning prince. Some of the most famous names in the succeeding history can be traced to this origin Walter Tirel was lord of Poix in Ponthieu, Gilbert of Ghent was the ancestor of the medieval earls of Lincoln. But the best way of realising the prevalence of this non-Norman element among the conquerors of England is to work through one of the schedules which the compilers of Domesday Book prefixed to the survey of each county, giving the names of its land-owners, and to note the proportion of "Frenchmen" to pure Normans. In Northamptonshire, for example, among forty-three lay tenants there occur six Flemings, three Bretons, and two Picards, and Northamptonshire in this respect is a typical county.
At or about the time of the council of Lillebonne there is reason to believe that messages were passing between William and Harold concerning the fulfilment of the fateful oath. It is fairly certain that William demanded the surrender of the crown and Harold's immediate marriage to his daughter, agreeing in return to confirm him in his earldom of Wessex, which last is probably what is meant when our rhetorical informants tell us that William promised to grant half the kingdom to his rival. Such negotiations were bound to fall through; Harold had gone too far to withdraw, even if he had been so minded, and William's object in making these proposals could only have been to maintain in the eyes of the world the appearance of a lawful claimant deprived of his inheritance. Also we may be quite sure that the building of the fleet was not interrupted during the progress of the negotiations.
The difficulties of Harold's reign began early. The weakness of his position was revealed at the outset by the refusal of Northumbria to accept him as king, a refusal very possibly prompted by Earl Morcar, who could not be expected to feel much loyalty towards the new dynasty. By making a special journey to York, Harold succeeded in silencing the opposition for 