【英文原著类】William the Conqueror(征服者).pdf

William the Conqueror
William the Conqueror
Edward A. Freeman
1
William the Conqueror
CHAPTER I--INTRODUCTION
The history of England, like the land and its people, has been specially
insular, and yet no land has undergone deeper influences from without. No
land has owed more than England to the personal action of men not of
native birth. Britain was truly called another world, in opposition to the
world of the European mainland, the world of Rome. In every age the
history of Britain is the history of an island, of an island great enough to
form a world of itself. In speaking of Celts or Teutons in Britain, we are
speaking, not simply of Celts and Teutons, but of Celts and Teutons parted
from their kinsfolk on the mainland, and brought under mon
influences of an island world. The land has seen several settlements from
outside, but the settlers have always been brought under the spell of their
insular position. Whenever settlement has not meant displacement, the
ers have been assimilated by the existing people of the land.
When it has meant displacement, they have still e islanders, marked
off from those whom they left behind by characteristics which were the
direct result of settlement in an island world.
The history of Britain then, and specially the history of England, has
been largely a history of elements absorbed and assimilated from without.
But each of those elements has done somewhat to modify the mass into
which it was absorbed. The English land and nation are not as they might
have been if they had never in later times absorbed the Fleming, the
French Huguenot, the German Palatine. Still less are they as they might
have been, if they had not in earlier times absorbed the greater elements of
the Dane and the Norman. Both were assimilated; but both modified the
character and destiny of the people into whose substance they were
absorbed. The conquerors from Normandy were silently and peacefully
lost in the greater mass of t