The history of the Norman conquest of England, its causes and its results, Volume 3 (of 6)

How it begins

The central stage of our journey is now reached. We are now on the threshold of the great year, of that year whose effects on all later English, on all later European, history can never be wiped out. No one year in later English history can for a moment compare, in lasting importance, with the year which, with some small exaggeration, we may call the year of the Norman Conquest. |No later time in which one year and one day stand out in the same way.| There have indeed been later periods in our history which have been as memorable in their results as the invasion of William itself.