William,
Duke of Normandy, who for a long time had looked across the
water with an envious eye, crossed the Channel in October
of the year 1066. At the battle of Hastings, on October the
fourteenth of that year, he destroyed the weak forces of Harold
of Wessex, the last of the Anglo-Saxon Kings and established
himself as King of England. But neither William nor his
successors of the House of Anjou and Plantagenet regarded
England as their true home. To them the island was merely a
part of their great inheritance on the continent--a sort of
colony inhabited by rather backward people upon whom they
forced their own language and civilisation. Gradually however
the ``colony'' of England gained upon the ``Mother
country'' of Normandy. At the same time the Kings of
France were trying desperately to get rid of the powerful Norman-
English neighbours who were in truth no more than disobedient
servants of the French crown. After a century of war
fare the French people, under the leadership of a young girl by
the name of Joan of Arc, drove the ``foreigners'' from their
soil. Joan herself, taken a prisoner at the battle of Compiegne
in the year 1430 and sold by her Burgundian captors to the
English soldiers, was burned as a witch. But the English
never gained foothold upon the continent and their Kings were
at last able to devote all their time to their British possessions.
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