The Crown

Abstract

ON 14 October 1966, England celebrated the nine-hundredth I anniversary of the Battle of Hastings. This event was a climacteric in English national history, a watershed of tradition and custom, a definite, almost an abrupt, termination of one period of the British island story and the beginning of another. For the Norman Conquest was not only the beginning of a new culture superimposed on the old, it was in every sense a political revolution. As a result of it there developed within England what Sir William Anson has described as

A constitution which began with the rude organisation of a group of settlers in a hostile country, has been adapted, first to the wants of a highly civilised race, then to the government of a vast Empire, and this by an insensible process of change, without any attempt to recast it as a whole, or even to state it in written form.¹