of peace by his death. For the Earl of Northumberland and Morel his steward, an old friend of Malcolm's, decoyed him and his son into an ambush and killed them. When the good Queen Margaret heard "how her dearest lord and son had been thus betrayed, she was grieved to the death in her heart, and went with her priest to church, got her rights [was shriven], prayed to God, and then gave up the ghost." She was rightly counted a saint, for "she had loved God with her whole heart," and had brought the king, her husband, and his people out of many of the evil ways they walked in before, so that "he was well pleased with the new customs she held, and was wont to thank God that gave him such a wife." She made Scotland an English kingdom instead of a mere Keltic principality, by encouraging English and Norman settlers, using English ways and speech, and getting the king to live at Edinburgh in the Lothians among the English, rather than in the Highlands in the old Keltic fashion.

The first
Crusade.

In 1095 the Earl of Northumberland and Morel robbed some Norwegian merchants, who complained to the king. He generously made good their losses himself, and summoned the earl to court. When he refused to come, and William found out that he was plotting to dethrone him in favour of Stephen of Aumale his cousin, he called out his English levies, took the earl, and learning from Morel the whole plot, put him in prison, where he lay thirty years, which was looked on as a fit reward for his treason to Malcolm. 4. Soon after this William was able to get rid of the annoys stirred up by those who hated him and loved his brother. For the duke was minded to go on a Crusade for the good of his father's soul, and having spent all his money in riotous living, suffering his very servants to rob him even of his clothes, he offered to pledge Normandy if the king would give him money for his equipment and journey. William gladly lent him £6666, and he started with most of his troublesome friends. As Robert was one of those men whose real worth only comes out when they are forced into action, he behaved so well in the Crusade, showing both valour and self-restraint, that when Jerusalem was taken on Good Friday 1099, and a Christian kingdom set up there, the crown was offered to him. But all danger being over, his natural laziness prevailed, and he refused it and went home, reaching Normandy soon after William's death.

This first Crusade came about through the cruelty and

bigotry of the Turks, who having taken the Holy City, where the Arabs had formerly suffered pilgrims to come unhurt, now began insulting and murdering the Christians and defiled the Holy Place. The Pope, hearing the bitter complaints of the pilgrims, preached at a great gathering in France, and telling the story of their wrongs, exhorted his hearers to "go and deliver the Sepulchre of the Lord." His sermon was received with shouts of "God wills it! We will go!" and thousands of all ranks, sewing a little cross of coloured cloth on their left arm in token of their promise, vowed to go and fight the misbelievers and free the Holy Land.

Wars in Wales.

5. Robert's pledge made William the greatest king in Europe. He held the best parts of France, and having the rents from many forfeited estates and vacant church lands, was even richer than his father. Only in Wales there was still war, for though South Wales had been won already by Norman adventurers bit by bit, the North Welsh made a stout resistance, while their border was being slowly driven in, castle after castle rising upon the newly-won lands.

The Earl of Chester, Hugh the Fat, and Hugh the Proud of Shrewsbury, were the bitterest foes the Welsh had, and would have taken the whole coast of North Wales and even Anglesey, but for Magnus Bareleg, King of Norway, who sailed into the Menai Straits as the two border earls were engaged in subduing the island. They drew up their men to prevent the Northmen landing, when the king ran his ships close to the shore and there was a sharp fight. "Hugh the Proud

He was

was on horseback in the water in front of his men. covered all over in mail so that save his eyes there was not a bare spot on him. King Magnus and a Fin that stood by him on the quarterdeck of his ship both shot at the earl at the same time. One arrow hit the nosepiece of the helmet so hard that it bent on one side, but the other struck Hugh's eye and pierced through his head so that the point stood out at the nape of his neck, and men saw that that arrow was the king's." As a northern poet sang"The king shot hard and fast: the shaft rang on the mail,

Our lord his elm bow draws: the blood spirts on the helmet, The bowstrings' war-hail [arrows] smote upon the rings; before it The foe quailed. In sharp onslaught the Norse king slew the earl." Magnus shouted mockingly as the earl fell forward into the sea, "Let him dive if he will!" and the leaderless Englishmen left the shore. So making truce with Hugh the Fat, the king won Anglesey, gave it to Owen, Eadmund Ironside's

stepson, to hold under him, and sailed away to meet his own death soon after in a raid on Ireland. Hugh the Proud's fate was put down to the vengeance of a Welsh saint in whose chapel he had kennelled his hounds some days before. One of Harold's sons was with Magnus on this cruise. It is likely that William himself would have won all Wales and perhaps Ireland too, now that his hands were free from other business, but for his sudden death in the height of his power.

6. On Thursday, August 2, 1100, he was at a huntingWilliam's death lodge in the New Forest with his brother Henry, and character. a French knight named Walter Tirel, whose skill in archery had made him a favourite, and a few other courtiers. Before they started for the day's sport two men came to him. One a fletcher [arrow-maker] with a gift of six finelymade arrows, which the king gladly took, thanking the giver, and handing two to Walter with the words, "I know thou Iwilt make the best use of them." The second bore a letter from Serlo, Abbot of Gloucester, telling him of a dreadful dream one of his monks, William by name, had had concerning him. He thought he was in the abbey church, and that he saw a beautiful lady clothed in white glistening raiment come in and cast herself before the Rood, praying very earnestly to the Lord to have mercy upon her and overthrow her enemy. Whereon he seemed to see the image on the Rood bow its head towards her and answer, "Be patient, and within a little space thou shalt surely be avenged." Awaking in great terror he told his vision to Serlo, who seeing that the White Lady prefigured the Church, and fearful that the anger of the Lord was kindled against the king, made haste to write him the dream and the interpretation thereof, earnestly beseeching him to repent. But though William himself had been specially warned not to go hunting that day, he laughed at the letter. "Serlo is a good man and wishes me well, but he must be doting to send me the dreams of his snoring monks. Am I, an Englishman, to be stopped in what I am about by an old wife's whims?" and went forth. When the driving began the king and Tirel alighted, and were posted near one another in a ride with no one else by. A great grizzled hart came bounding towards them; William shot at it, and missing called out to Tirel, "Shoot, Walter! shoot in the devil's name!" The knight drew his bow, the arrow grazed the beast as it ran between them, and glancing, struck the king to the heart. Walter saw him fall and fled, and William lay there till sunset, when they

took up his body and sent it on a charcoal-burner's cart, like a dead boar, to Winchester, where he was laid "unhouseled, unanointed, unanneled," in the Old Minster, mourned only by his soldiers and boon companions.

One of his English subjects says of him, "He was mighty and terrible over his land, and his men, and towards all his neighbours. All that was loathsome in the eyes of God and righteous men was of common use in his time; wherefore he was loathed by wellnigh all his people, and hateful to God as his end showed." But it cannot be gainsaid that he was a faithful son, a kind master, and a brave knight, and though passionate and foul-tongued, able to boast with truth that he never did in anger what he would not have done in cold blood. He was utterly fearless, and too proud to be cruel. Once when he was embarking for Normandy, and the shipmaster was afraid to weigh anchor in the gale that was blowing, he bid him, "Set sail! I never heard of a king being drowned." One of his prisoners telling him in a rage that he would defy his power if he were but free again, he loosed him and told him to go and do his worst. If he had but had his father's sense of duty, he would not have fallen short of his fame. In person he was stout, strong, and big-limbed, with light hair and a red face (whence his nickname, Red Dragon), and keen, restless, grey-spotted eyes, under a broad high brow standing out in four bosses as it were. His voice was loud, and he stammered, especially when he was angry,

CHAPTER III.

Henry the Scholar, 1100-1135.

1. As soon as he knew of his brother's death Henry rode off to Winchester and seized the royal treasury. Henry and Those of the Wise Men that were at hand chose Normandy. him to be king, and the next Sunday "before the altar at Westminster he promised God and all the people to put down all unrighteousness that had been in his brother's time, and to hold the best laws that ever stood in any king's days before him." He then imprisoned Ranulf, and abolished the unjust devices by which he had wrested the law to get money, while he wrote to Anselm praying him "to come back, like a father, to his son Henry and the English people." He also

wrote all the promises he made at Westminster, together with a list of the evil customs he meant to put down, in a charter, which he sent into every shire. The court was set in order, and the king's Counting-House or Exchequer better officered and worked than before. But the English were chiefly pleased with the king's marriage to Eadgyth or Maud, the daughter of Malcolm and Margaret of Scotland, and therefore a princess of the old West Saxon line. The Norman lords, who had despised Henry in his youth, but had been outwitted by his readiness in seizing the throne, now hated him and "his English ways," and when Robert came back they determined to make him king by force. Their leaders were Robert of Belesme, a powerful and crafty man, who used his great talents merely to further his monstrous cruelty and wickedness; Ivo of Grantmesnil (who boasted that he was the first man in England that ever dared to proclaim war on a neighbour), a cunning soldier, but a coward as he showed when he fled from the Crusade, letting himself down from the walls of Antioch in a basket, for which he got the name of Rope-dancer; and Ranulf Torch, who escaped from the Tower by making his jailers drunk and climbing the walls by a cord smuggled in to him in a wine-jar. The duke's claims were bought off for 3000 marks a year and a renewal of William's old agreement; Ivo was outlawed; but Robert of Belesme defied the king, till the English levies took his castles one by one, when he surrendered and was allowed to leave the realm. The English rejoiced at the fall of the most loathed of the barons and sung:

'Make merry, King Henry, and thank the Almighty!

For your reign in good earnest begins from the day When you beat down and overcame Robert of Belesme, And banished him out of the bounds of your kingdom." But the duke received the exiles, and the quarrel went on till the battle of Tenchebray, 1106, in which Henry took prisoners his brother, Eadgar the Etheling his fellow-crusader, and many of the refugees. Eadgar, being the queen's uncle, was set free, but Robert and the others were imprisoned for life. So the duchy and the kingdom were again under one man's rule, and the Englishmen in Henry's army said that they had revenged Senlac by conquering Normandy.

2. There was a quarrel raging at this time between the Anselm and Pope and the Emperor about the appointment of bishops. The Pope wished to secure the election of good men as church-officers, and the Emperor was not willing to give up the right of filling these posts, since

Henry.