The one absorbing passion of his life at this moment was hatred of
his successful rival--not so much as his rival, but as the murderer
of his father.
All the Norman inhabitants of the neighbourhood crowded the abbey
church on the morrow, and were present at the Mass of the day; the
poor English were there in small numbers; they could not worship
devoutly in company with their oppressors, but frequented little
village sanctuaries, too poverty stricken to invite Norman
cupidity, where, on that very account, the poor clerics of English
race might still minister to their scattered flocks, and preach to
them in the language Alfred had dignified by his writings, but
which the Normans compared to the "grunting of swine."
And the service in the church over, how grand was the company which
met in the banqueting hall of the palace on the island!
The Conqueror sat at the head of the board; on his right hand the
Count d'Harcourt, head of an old Norman family, which still
retained many traces of its Danish descent, and was as little
French-like as Normans of that date could be; De le Pole,
progenitor of a fated house, well-known in English history; De la
Vere, the ancestor of future Earls of Oxford; Arundel, who
bequeathed his name to a town on the Sussex coast, where his
descendants yet flourish; Clyfford, unknowing of the fate which
awaited his descendants in days of roseate hue; FitzMaurice, a name
to become renowned in Irish story; Gascoyne, ancestor of a judge
whose daring justice should immortalise his name; Hastings, whose
descendant fell the victim of the Boar of Gloucester in later days;
Maltravers, whose name was destined to be defiled at Berkeley
Castle in Plantagenet times; Peverel, a name now familiar through
the magic pen of Scott; Talbot, whose progeny, in times when the
Normans' children had become the English of the English, burnt the
ill-fated "Maid" at Rouen {xx}.
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