The Conquest of England Author:John Richard Green, Alice Stopford Green 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: Chap. i. on a far more profound change in its moral life. The We have already noted the more striking and pict- Ecgberht uresque sides of the revolution which... more » had been wrought in the displacement of the old faith and the adoption of the new—the planting of a Church on the soil with its ecclesiastical organization, its bishops, its priests, its court, and its councils, its language, its law, above all, the new impulse given to political consolidation by the building up of Britain into a single religious communion. But these results of the new faith were small and unimportant beside the revolution which was wrought by it in individual life. From the cradle to the grave it had forced on the Englishman a new law of conduct, new habits, new conceptions of life and society. It entered above all into that sphere within which the individual will of the freeman had been till now supreme— the sphere of the home; it curtailed his powers over child and wife and slave; it forbade infanticide, the putting away of wives, or cruelty to the serf. It challenged almost every social conception; it denied to the king his heritage of the blood of the gods; it proclaimed slavery an evil, war an evil, manual labor a virtue. It met the feud face to face by denouncing revenge. It held up gluttony and drunkenness, the very essence of the old English " feast," as sins. It claimed to control every circumstance of life. It interfered with labor-customs by prohibitions of toil on Sundays and holydays. It forced on a rude community, to which bodily joys were dear, long and painful fasts. Even profounder modifications were brought about by the changes it wrought in the personal history of every Englishman. Ceremonialismhung round every one in those old days from the Chap. i. cradle to the grave, and by the con...« less