Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: however, a record in stone, which has lasted possibly from Elfleda’s time, of which we shall presently have much to say, which tells us that, if Saxon pens were idle, Saxon hands were not so, but, on the contrary, were busily engaged between that noble lady’s time and the actual arrival of the Normans. Edward the Confessor having died in peaceable possession of the throne, rumours were soon after heard of the intended coming of the Normans, and no long time passed before they had actually landed and defeated the English in the great battle of Hastings, in which Harold, the English king, who had opposed them, fell on the field. Harold had been a landowner in Cheshire, and hither, after his death, Algitha, his widowed queen, is said to have repaired to seek shelter with her brother Edwin, the Governor of Mercia. Chapter II. The Conquest. William The Conqueror (who, according to Blackstone and some other law writers, was not a conqueror of the nation in the strict sense of the word, but only a conqueror in the sense of being the first acquirer of the kingdom of his race) found for a time that what he had won by the sword, by the sword must be maintained. In the year 1086, however, when he had begun to feel more secure in his seat on the throne, he completed the great national survey called Domesday Book, a work such as no other country can boast of possessing, and which, though it is a badge of our conquest, is one of which we Englishmen may be justly proud. This survey contains the latest record before the curtain fell on the Saxon era of all the landed property in England. In making it, the King’s commissioners made diligent inquiry into the names of the several places, who the persons were who had held them in the time of the Confessor, and who held them at the time of the …