NATURE 
2901 
Aug. 7, 1873] 
er out above all others in the history of Exeter, when 
ey might say that for eighteen days Exeter was England. 
The tale of the great siege he had told elsewhere in full 
detail, and he would not tell it again now, but the story of 
the resistance of the western lands and their capital to the 
full power of the Conqueror, was one that never ought to 
pass away from the memories of Englishmen. The bravery 
of the inhabitants formed a tale which, even in that stirring 
time, spoke more than any other—save the tale of the 
great battle itself—to the hearts of all who loved to bear 
in mind how long and hard a work it was to make England 
yield to her foreign master. But whilst our hearts beat 
with those of the defenders of Exeter, yet we saw none the 
less now that it was for the good of England that Exeter 
fell. A question was here decided, greater than that 
whether Harold, Edgar, or William should reiga—the 
question whether England should be one. When Exeter 
stood forward for onc moment to claim the rank of a free, 
imperial city, and her rulers expressed themselves willing 
to receive William as an external lord, but refused to admit 
him within her walls as her immediate sovereign, they saw 
that the tendency was at work ia England by which the 
kingdom of the continent was split up into loose collections 
of independent cities and principalities, and the path was 
opening by which Exeter might have come to be another 
Lubeck, the head of a Damonian house, another Bern, 
the mistress of the subject lands of the Western Penin- 
sula. Such a dream might sound wild in our ears, 
and we might be sure that no such ideas were present 
in any such definite shape to the minds of the defenders 
of Exeter. But any such designs were probably just 
as little known to the minds of those who in any German 
or Italian city took the first steps in the course by which 
from a municipality, or less, the city grew into a sovereign 
commonwealth. Historically, the separate defence of 
Exeter was simply an instance of the way in which, after 
Harold was gone, England was conquered bit by bit. 
York never dreamed of helping Exeter, and Exeter, if it 
had the wish, had not the power to help York. But 
it was none the less true when we saw a confederation 
of western towns, with the great city of the district at 
their head, suddenly starting into life to check the progress 
of the Conqueror—we saw that a spirit had been kindled 
which, had it not been checked at once, might have 
grown into something, of which those who manned the 
walls of Exeter assuredly never thought. We could 
hardly mourn that such a tendency was stopped even by 
the arm of a foreign conqueror. We could hardly mourn 
that the greatness of Exeter was not purchased at the 
cost of the greatness of England. But it was worth 
while to stop and think how near England once was to 
running the same course as other lands. From the sacri- 
fice of the general welfare of the whole to the greater 
brilliance of particular members of the whole, we had 
been saved by a variety of causes, and not the least of 
them by the personal character of a series of great kings 
working in the cause of national unity, from West Saxon 
Egbert to Norman William. The tendency of the 
patriotic movements in William’s reign was to division ; 
the tendency of William’s own rule was to union. The 
aims of the Exeter patricians could not have been long 
reconciled with the aims of the sons of Harold, nor could 
the aims of either have been reconciled for a moment 
with those of the partisans of the Etheling Edgar, or of 
the Danish Sweyn. We sympathised with the defenders 
of Exeter, York, Ely, and Durham, but from the moment 
England lost the one man of her own sons who was fit 
to guide her, her best fate in the long run was to pass as 
-an individual kingdom into the hands of the victorious 
rival. 
With the subjection of Exeter by William might fairly 
be ended the tale of the place of Exeter in English 
history. It was then settled for Exeter that she was 
-to be an English city—no separate commonwealth—a 
member of the individual English kingdom, but still 
a city that was to remain the undisputed head of its 
own district. Its history from this time was less 
the history of Exeter than the history of those events 
in English history that took place at Exeter, It 
still had its municipal, ecclesiastical, its commercial 
history, but no longer a separate political being of its 
own. It was no longer an object to be striven for by men 
of contending nations, nor something that might be cut 
off from the English realm either by the success of a 
foreign conqueror or the independence of its own citizens. 
In the other sense of the word, as pointing out those 
events of English history of which Exeter was the scene, 
the place of Exeter in English history was one which 
yielded to that of no other city in the land save London 
itself. It was with a true instinct that the two men who 
open the two great eras in local history—English Ethel- 
stan and Norman William—both gave such special heed 
to the military defences of the city. No city in England 
had stood more sieges. It stood one, and perhaps two 
more, before William's own reign was ended—indeed 
before William had brought the conquest of the whole 
land to an end by the taking of Chester. The men of 
Exeter had withstood William as long as he came before 
them as a foreign invader ; when his power was once fully 
established, when the Castle on the Red Mount held 
down the city in fetters, they seemed to have had no 
inclination to join in hopeless insurrections against him. 
When, a yearand ahalf after the great siege, the Castle 
was again besieged by West Saxon insurgents, the citizens 
seemed to have joined the Norman garrison in resisting 
the attack. According to one account they had already 
done the like to the sons of Harold and their Irish 
auxiliaries. The wars of Stephen did not pass without a 
siege of Exeter, in which king and citizens joined to be- 
siege the rebellious lord of Rougemont, and at last to 
starve him within the towers of which legend was 
already beginning to speak as the work of the Czesars, 
To pass to later times, the Tudor era saw two 
sieges of the city, one at the hands of a pretender to 
the crown, and another at the hands of the religious 
insurgents of the further West. Twice again in the wars 
of the next century Exeter passed from the one side to the 
other by dint of siege, and at the last she received an in- 
vader at whose coming no siege was needed. The entry 
of William the Deliverer through the Western Gate 
formed the balance—the contrast—to the entry of 
William the Conqueror through the Eastern Gate. The 
city had resisted to the utmost when a foreign invader, 
under the guise of an English king, came to demand her 
obedience. But no eighteen days’ siege, no blinded host- 
ages, no undermined ramparts were needed when a kins- 
man and a deliverer came under the guise of a foreign 
invader. In the army of William of Normandy Eng- 
lishmen were pressed to complete the conquest of Eng- 
land, but in the army of William of Orange, strangers 
came to awake her sons to begin the work of her deliver- 
ance. In the person of the earlier William the Crown of 
England passed away for the first time to a king wholly 
alien in speech and feeling; in the later William it in 
truth came back to one who was even in mere descent, 
and yet more fully in his native land and native speech, 
nearer than all that came between them to the old stock 
of Hengist and Cedric. The one was the first king who 
reigned over England purely by the edge of the sword, 
the other the last king who reigned over England purely, 
by the choice of the nation. The coming of each of 
the men who entered Exeter in such opposite characters 
marked an era in our history. The unwilling greeting 
which Exeter gave to the one William and the willing 
greeting which she gave to the other, marked the wide 
difference in the external aspect of the two revolutions, 
And yet both revolutions had worked for the same end ; 
the great actors in both were, however unwittingly 
