ing even the counsels of her uncle David, who had again marched into England to help her; she refused to let Stephen's kinsmen have their rights, took back the grants he had made to the Church, and fining the Londoners heavily, denied them the Law of King Edward, which her father had promised them for ever. The end of all this was that one day as she was sitting down to dinner the city bells rang the alarm, and the Londoners swarmed out sword in hand like angry wasps from their comb, resolved to take her prisoner and slay her followers. She had only time to fly on a swift steed, leaving all her jewels, dress, and plate behind her, to Winchester. The Londoners now sent for Stephen's queen, swore to be true to her, and sent a thousand mail-clad men under the city banner, the standard of S. Paul, with her to the siege of Winchester. For Henry of Blois, moved by the prayers of his brother's wife, the folly of Matilda, and the cruel treatment she gave his brother, now forsook the party he had so warmly taken up, and joined Stephen's queen also. The empress beleaguered his castle with a great host, in which were the King of Scots, eight great earls, and many barons. Stephen's queen, however, after several skirmishes, obliged the empress to retreat, and attacking her army as it left the town, threw it into a panic, and turned the retreat to a rout. The country-folk rose upon the flying barons, while the Londoners sacked Winchester and gained great spoil. The King of Scots and Earl Robert were taken. The empress fled on horseback to Devizes, whence, fearing the people, her followers having covered her with grave-clothes bore her on a bier to Gloucester. Robert was now exchanged for Stephen, and the empress was hard pressed by the king, and in 1142 blockaded in Oxford Castle. After three months' close siege, food began to fail, and it was clear the place must fall; Matilda therefore, one dark night, had herself let down from the great tower by ropes with four knights, all dressed in white to escape being seen, for the snow was thick on the ground. They passed the sentinels unchallenged, and crossing the frozen Thames made their way on foot down the river to Abingdon, where horses were waiting for them, and so reached their friends safely. 5. Earl Robert's death and the empress's departure from England in 1148 put an end to the hopes of her party, but there was still no peace, every baron fighting for his own hand, and the king too weak to put them down. In 1153, Henry, Duke of Normandy, landed in England. Well schooled, able, and rich, for he was the pupil of

Peace of Wallingford.

his uncles Robert and David, had learned war in defending his duchy against Stephen's son, and was become, by his late marriage with Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine (whom the King of France had put away), one of the greatest princes in Europe, he might hope to win back all his mother had lost and more. But he was too wise to risk a pitched battle, and when Eustace died in 1153 (the brave queen was already dead), he was willing to listen to the wishes of good men, who, yearning to put an end to the long war, and alarmed by the attack of Eystein, King of Norway (who ravaged the coast of Yorkshire, burned Whitby and Langton, and boasted that he had revenged Harold Hardrede), besought him to make terms with Stephen. Peace was agreed between them at Wallingford. The king was to rule while he lived, but Henry was to be his heir; the courts, laws, and money of the old days were to be restored, and the land to be set at peace; all evil-doers being brought to justice, all the castles which had been built without licence being plucked down, and the hired soldiers sent out of England. The duke stayed for a while in England as Stephen's Justiciar, helping him to carry out the treaty, and then went home. In 1154 Stephen died, October 25, and his body was laid at Feversham, in the abbey he had founded, by the side of his wife and son. Handsome, tall, and strong, a gallant knight, a cheerful companion, a pious, merciful, and mildhearted man, Stephen's unfitness for the office to which he was chosen is yet most certain. England has never been worse ruled, and the awful verdict of the chronicler can neither be gainsaid nor appealed against-" In his days was nought but war and wickedness and waste."

CHAPTER V.

England under the Norman Kings.

1. Under the Norman kings there were many changes in England. Almost the whole generation of English noblemen and gentry had been swept away, and their places filled by a foreign king, his kinsmen, and soldiers, who, though they did not pretend to have greater right or power than those they had succeeded, yet naturally took advantage of their position to get the most they could out of their tenants and serfs. We hear of heavy exactions, forced labour under

Changes at the
Conquest.

colour of law, of villages laid waste to enlarge the king's hunting-grounds, and town-parishes destroyed to make way for the nobles' castles. William I. compelled all who held land of the king as thegens (barons and knights they were now called) to find a man to serve forty days in the royal army, fully armed and horsed at their expense, for every knight's fee (piece of land worth £20 per year) they held. He also exacted reliefs (originally a year's rent) from incoming tenants and heirs, and gave the lord full power over his infant tenant's land till he came of age, and the right of marrying heiresses and widows to whom he would. If the lord made his son a knight, or gave his eldest daughter in marriage, or was captured in war, he looked to his tenants for aids or contributions to defray his expenses or his ransom. The barons of course enforced the same services upon their military tenants as the king enforced upon them. Other free-tenants, socmen or franklins, were obliged to pay some fixed rent in kind or money and to attend the lord's court, while the villeins or tenants at the lord's will were almost entirely at his mercy, and were obliged to labour on his lands and buildings whenever he chose to call for their services. But in all these cases the change lay rather in the greater strictness and regularity of the new lords than the rise of new customs or the breach of old rights. There were few new laws made, except about the forests, any man who hunted in the king's woods without permission (and much of the untilled commons was now become royal forest) might be tried and condemned to lose his hands or feet or eyes. Henry I. even ordered that all dogs whose feet were too big to pass through a ring kept by the foresters should have two of the toes of its forefeet cut off, that it might not be able to run down deer, though still useful for droving. These laws were hated, and many Englishmen took to the woods, living as poachers, defying the king's keepers, and robbing the rich passengers, especially foreigners, who passed their haunts, so that people living near a forest were obliged to fortify their houses for fear of these brigands. The Conqueror, after the old English custom, put no man to death for law-breaking, but punished by outlawry, fine, or mutilation; however, his son Henry found the need of sterner measures, and began hanging men for theft and other felonies (bad crimes) or treasons. We hear of two customs at this time which, whether brought in by the Normans or the Danes, became part of English law. One was wager of battle, the right of the accused to prove his innocence by single combat with his

accuser or his champion, instead of by compurgation or ordeal if he preferred it. The other was the inquest, a mode of getting knowledge of the facts of any disputed case by swearing a jury of twelve men of the neighbourhood to declare what they knew of the subject. It was from the verdict or report of such inquests that Domesday Book was put together.

2. The crown was much stronger than before the Conquest, the officers of the royal household had more to do, and the central government became powerful and important. The justiciar had to see that justice was given to all who asked it; the chancellor issued royal grants, writs (orders to sheriffs to summon juries, arrest prisoners, execute justice, etc.), and warrants; the treasurer sat at the king's counting-house, or Exchequer as it was now called (because of the chessboardlike cloth on which they reckoned the money), The royal where Henry's friend Roger of Salisbury set officers and up a regular system of keeping and paying Curia Regis. accounts, and devised a plan of sending commissioners round to the counties to settle disputes about the revenue in full county court. To the Exchequer, too, every year the sheriffs came to pay the feorm or rent of the county and the fines into the treasury, receiving their quietus, or certificate of payment. Tallies, little slips of wood notched on the edges with different marks according to the value they represented, were split in two, and (each party keeping half) served as check and counterfoil when any money was paid out of the royal treasury. Beside these great offices often held by churchmen, the great nobles did not now disdain to hold places in the household as dispenser (steward), butler, chamberlain, or to serve the king as marshal or as constable of his host; these places (all held by laymen) soon became hereditary. The king's household, Curia Regis, served him as a kind of Ministry, and followed him on his journeys. There were still Councils of the Wise Men, and often Great Moots, Magna Concilia, to which every one who held land of the king might come. Several new earldoms were made. Two in especial, Chester and Shrewsbury, with palatine rights (power to hold courts and to issue writs in the earl's name), to be the better able to defend the Welsh border, were created by William, and others by his successors. 3. In spite of the difficulties of the problem, Lanfranc's policy had been successful: the Church of England was far stronger than before. The reforms of king found it his best friend as long as he ruled the Church. well, while the people looked to it alone for help against the

Power and

lawlessness of the barons or the heavy hands of the king's officers. Henry made two new sees, Ely and Carlisle, and gave these bishops palatine rights for defence against Danes and Scots. Many abbeys were founded by the great barons, and when the strict Cistercian rule was brought to England early in the twelfth century, the monasteries of its followers soon sprung up "in the desert places" of the Welsh hills and Yorkshire wolds. The reforming synods of Lanfranc and Anselm, and the new bishops' courts, did much to raise the character of the parish clergy; their decrees against the marriage of priests were, however, still evaded by the payment of a yearly tax to the king. The increasing wealth and zeal of the Church was marked by the stately cathedrals which were fast replacing the smaller and less splendid English minsters, just as the high stone wall (ballium) and huge square keep (central tower) were everywhere supplanting the paled foss of earth and stockaded mound of earlier days. The fashion for building great churches and stone castles had indeed begun before the Conquest, as Edward the Confessor's Westminster bears witness; but the finest examples of the Roman round-arch style of building, sacred or secular-such as Durham Minster, begun by William of S. Calais and finished by Ranulf Torch; the Gate Tower at Bury; Norwich Minster, built by Herbert Losinge; Carisbrooke Keep; Tintagel Hold; Gundulf's White Tower, and William of Corbeil's Keep at Rochester-date from the Norman kings' reign.

4. The English tongue was less changed by the Norman than the Danish Conquest. Charters and deeds were still in Old English or Latin. French was indeed spoken at court, and Latin in the cloister, and a few words found their way into the speech of the people, but the chief effect of the disuse of English by the upper classes was to hasten and deepen the changes already going on in our tongue (as noticed above), and to give rise to the well-marked dialects in which all Middle English was written and spoken.

letters.

There were few writers in such hard and restless days; but Language and we must notice the two nameless Peterborough monks who close the English Chronicle; William the elder's chaplain, William of Poitiers, who wrote of the Norman Conquest; Orderic of S. Evroult, an English monk who lived in Normandy and wrote a most minute and pathetic account of his own life and times; William of Malmesbury, who wrote for Robert of Gloster the most scientific of our Latin histories; and Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, an outspoken critic who loved old ballads and stories.