Page 69 - Poetry-Whimsy

None of recorded historical bastings
Is more complete than the battle of Hastings;
And William the Conqueror promptly determined
To have himself crowned and sceptered and ermined.

This purpose was shortly a realized hope.
By the aid of a sword and a bull of the Pope
Which was brought by a bishop, his own half-brother
(Quite unrelated to William’s half-mother),
Who dropped vague hints about milk and honey,
Which, in the case of a bishop, means money.

William, with density almost alarming,
Bluffly confessed he knew nothing of farming;
Honey, he thought, should be easy to find,
But in following bees keep a trifle behind;
Then, too, if the bishop’s milk-can was not full,
Why, doubtless, the bishop could milk the bull!
However, the bishop still harbored a doubt,
So was sent to a prison to think it all out.

The monarch now passed quite a number of acts on
The every-day manner of life of the Saxon;
He mapped out the land in a Doomsday Book,
In which all the Saxons were privileged to look
For the boundary-lines of their farms, great or small,
And to find that they didn’t own any at all.
If their despair to unpleasantness led,
The king yanked the curfew and sent them to bed,
And turned to the Doomsday Book to enlist ‘em
As villeins or serfs of his new feudal system.
Thus, in time, fair England was Normandized;
William, with dignity, rested and gormandized.
The Normans, meanwhile, their energies bent
To founding old families of Norman descent;
And modern statistics have rendered it plain,
By the number of people who come of this strain,
That most of the Normans abandoned as dead
At the battle of Hastings were buried—and bred!

Concerning usurpers, ‘t is often deplored
That in peaceable, prosperous times they are bored.

~ 67 ~