8. The Conquest of England.-It took three years and a half more to conquer England. The English had learned no lesson from their failure at Senlac. They could not unite against William. Sometimes the West resisted, sometimes the North. Each district fought separately, and each was separately overpowered.

CHAPTER VII.

THE CONQUEROR AND HIS SONS.

WILLIAM I, 1066. WILLIAM II., 1087. HENRY I., 1100.

war, but a

1. William the Conqueror.-William is known in history as the Conqueror. But the word did not. mean once what it means now. It did not mean a man who obtained his kingdom by a victory in man who obtained something which he did not possess before, whether he fought for it or not. William claimed to be King of England for certain reasons which, as he pretended, gave him a lawful title. Soon after the Battle of Senlac he was elected king by the great men, and though they were too much in fear of him to refuse to choose him, he could now speak of himself as the lawful King of England, as Edward and Alfred had been before him. He was one of those men who love order and good government whenever they do not come in the way of their own plans. would suffer no one to withstand him.

But he

'Stark he

was,' writes an Englishman of the time, to men who withstood him; so harsh and cruel was he that none withstood his will. Earls that did aught against his bidding he cast into bonds. Bishops he stripped of their bishoprics; abbots of their abbacies. He spared not his own brother; first he was in the land, but the king cast him into bondage. If a man would live and hold his lands, need it were that he followed the king's will.'

2. The Normans gain Lands in England.-Even when William did most wrong, he tried to make it seem as though it were rightly done. The fierce horsemen who had charged with him up the hill of Senlac had not come simply to please the Duke. They wanted to be great men in England, to own rich corn-lands and stately homes. If William had not got these things for them they would have turned against him. He therefore set to work to do as they wished, but he made robbery look like the enforcement of the law. He said that he had been the lawful king ever since the death of Edward, and that therefore all Englishmen who had fought against him at Senlac or anywhere else had been fighting against their lawful king, and had forfeited their lands as rebels. He thus got a very large number of estates into his hands, and these he gave away to his Norman followers. Before long, almost all the great estates were in the hands of Normans. The English kept small estates, or became dependent upon the great Norman landowners.

3. William supported both by the Normans and the English. In this way William was able to do

He took care

nearly everything that he wished to do. The Norman landowners submitted to him, because, if they had not had a king to lead them, the English would have driven them out. And, strange as it may seem, the English submitted to him not unwillingly. The Norman whom they hated most was not the king, but the landowner with his armed followers, who lived in their midst and was ready to ill-treat them. They would rather have had an English king than a Norman king. But they would rather have a Norman king to keep the Norman tyrants in order than no king at all. William had other schemes for securing obedience. that even the richest of the Norman landowners should not hold much land in any one county, so that his power might be weakened by being unable to bring easily together into one place the men who lived on his estates, and who might be willing to fight for him. In the towns too he built castles, the ruins of which are to be seen now in many places. He filled them with soldiers of his own. One of these was built by him to keep down London, and is known as the Tower of London. He gave lands to the great lords on condition that they would fight for him and bring other fighting men with them. Those who had lands. in this way knelt down before him and did homage to him. In order that the lords might be able to bring the proper number of fighting men, they gave pieces of their land to men who did homage to them. William was afraid that those who had done homage to the lords would be more faithful to the lords than to him, and would fight for the lords against

himself if they wanted to rebel. So he made all who had lands, either from him or from the lords, swear to him, at a great meeting at Salisbury, that they would be faithful to him. If they broke their oath he could punish them as traitors; whereas if he had not made them swear, they might have said that they must fight for their lords even against the king, because they had sworn to be faithful to them.

4. William's Cruelty.-William did worse things than this to secure his power. He was afraid that the Scots and the Danes might combine to attack the North of England. He therefore resolved to place a barrier between him and them. He pitilessly wasted the whole of the fertile Vale of York through which the North Eastern Railway now runs amidst smiling fields, with the moors on one side and the wolds on the other. Every house was burnt, every blade of corn destroyed. The inhabitants perished or sold themselves into slavery to get food. Of some of them it is recorded that they bowed their necks in the evil days for bread.' This means that they had to give themselves up to be slaves, that they might escape starvation.

6

5. The New Forest.-William's devastation in the north is less generally remembered than his devastation in the south. The Vale of York he wasted in order to defend himself against his enemies. The New Forest he wasted for pleasure. Like all his race he was passionately fond of hunting. It is said of him that he loved the high Ideer as if he had been their father.' There were terrible punishments for those who chased them

without his leave. Any one who has ever lived near the New Forest, and knows how poor the soil is, will be quite sure that it never could have been cultivated all over. What William did was to destroy the houses and crops scattered in fertile places. But even that was enough to bring on him the curses of the wanderers whom he had rendered homeless.

6. Domesday Book.-Sometimes a man is blamed. as much for things that he does well as for things that he does ill. To us one of his greatest titles to fame is the preparation of Domesday Book, a name which was explained by a writer, about a hundred years later, as meaning the day of doom, or judgment, because when it was appealed to in any dispute it was considered to settle the question. It was a record of the lands of England as well as of the men who owned them, and of the payments due to the king from each of these men. We know

how useful such a record must have been. It enabled the king to call upon each man to pay his fair share of taxation and no more. People then, as has sometimes happened since, would

have been glad to

pay no taxes at all.

'There was

not,' they said, ‘a

single rood of land, nor was there an ox, nor a cow, nor a pig passed by. It is shameful to tell that which he thought it no shame to do.' than this were said of him.

Worse things even
The king and the

head men loved much and overmuch covetousness on gold and on silver, and they recked not how sinfully it was gotten, if only it came to them.' With all his hardness William was a lover of justice when justice did not come in the way of his own projects.