Présentation de l'éditeur
England, exclaims Shakspeare s Faulconbridge in that stirring boast which will ring for ever in the ears of Englishmen, never did nor never shall Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror But when it first did help to wound itself. The Bastard generalised from a single instance ;for only once, from the time when the Angles gave the island its name down to King John sday, or for that matter down to our own, has England undergone a conquest in the strict -sense of the term, and no doubt on that one occasion it had first helped in the person of its ill-fated ruler to wound itself. But in the strife of malice domestic as distinguished from foreign levy, in the civil broils which have led to no conquests save those of political factions, and have left behind them no conquerors save the English prince who vanquished a kinsman, or the English rebel leader who overthrew his king, this England has given itself many a wound. One wonders whether those who have made no reckoning of their own will be prepared for or surprised by Mr. Barrett sstatistics of English battles that is to say, battles of the first rank in military or political importance from Fulford to Sedgemoor. Fulford, the first in his list, was fought on September 20, 1066, and Sedgemoor, fought on July 6, 1685, is the thirty-seventh. That means an average of one battle about every seventeen years for a period of a little over six centuries. It is a pretty long and a fairly lively tale, and it seems to show that even a country with no foreign enemy, save on a few occasions, to repel, no invader aiming at the position of proud-footed conqueror to defeat, may yet, by the healthy play of its own internal passions or political activities, make shift to accumulate as goodly an array of historic battlefields as can be found in lands divided from their neighbours by frontiers of field and hedgerow instead of being com
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
Présentation de l'éditeur
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