if they submitted, made up their minds to death. The passage to the top of the temple was forced by the Christians, and many of the Saracens were slaughtered on the roof, many cast themselves down and were dashed to pieces.

Such was the close of this terrible scene, which in itself possesses too many painful and distressing points to need those efforts which have been liberally bestowed in the present age, to make it appear more lamentable and shocking than it really was. Everything has been done to create an impression that the slaughter was indiscriminate and universal, and that it was generally renewed on the second day, for the purpose of exterminating the whole of the Mahommedan population of Jerusalem. We have the testimony of eye-witnesses to prove that even on the very day of the storming great numbers were spared; and there is not the slightest reason to believe that any massacre at all took place on the second day, except in the temple, where the determined resistance of the Mussulmen left the crusaders no choice. The most convincing testimony, however, is that of the Arab writer, Ibngiouzi, who tells us that one half of the population was spared. He computes the amount of the slain at a hundred thousand, which was very nearly the number of fighting men supposed to be within the city.

As soon as the capture of Jerusalem was complete, and the great work for which they had come so many miles, and endured so many evils, was accomplished, the leaders of the Crusade threw off the panoply of war, and putting on the vestments of penitents, proceeded from one holy place to another, to offer up their adorations with prayers and tears. The places of peculiar sanctity were purified and washed from the blood with which they were stained, and the grand consideration then became, how the Christian dominion, which it had cost so much to re-establish in the East, could be best maintained, surrounded as it was on every side by infidel enemies, whom every principle of policy should have taught to unite for the purpose of crushing the small body of inveterate foes which had succeeded in planting the banner of the Cross where the standard of Islam had so long stood unassailed.

Some time before the capture of the city of Jerusalem, the

difficulties and dangers which surrounded the Crusaders had called forth a proposal which no one had dreamed of at the commencement of the Crusade. A part of the troops clamoured loudly for the election of a King; and the dissensions which had taken place amongst the leaders, with the general want of unity in object, and in action, which had been conspicuous in all their proceedings since the siege of Antioch, certainly showed, in a manner likely to convince the blindest, that a leader was wanting, endowed with greater powers than those which the princes of the Crusade had conferred upon Godfrey. So general was this feeling that, at the end of eight days, the principal chiefs met together to elect a King of Jerusalem.

It might well be supposed that intrigues and dissensions would mark the choice of the princes; but no such events occurred, and there seems to have been very little doubt or hesitation in the mind of any one.

"By the common decree of all," says Robert the Monk, "by universal wish, and general assent, the Duke Godfrey was elected, on the eighth day after the capture of the city; and well did they all concur in such a choice, for he showed himself such in his government, that he did more honour to the royal dignity than that dignity conferred on him. This honour did not make him illustrious, but the glory of the honour was multiplied by hin. . . . He showed himself so superior and excellent in royal majesty, that if it had been possible to bring all the kings of the earth around him, he would have been judged by all, the first in chivalrous qualities, in beauty of face and body, and noble regularity of life." Nor is Fulcher of Chartres less laudatory; after describing the conquest of Jerusalem, he says, "Godfrey was the first prince made, who, from the excellence of his nobility, his valour as a knight, his gentleness of manners, modest patience, and admirable morals, the whole people of the army of God elected as chief of the kingdom of the holy city, to reign therein and to preserve it."

Godfrey was probably one of the few who did not seek the honour imposed upon him, but, on the contrary, notwithstanding the pressing entreaties of his fellow princes, he declined to receive the title of King, declaring that he would never wear a crown of gold in a city where his Saviour had worn a crown of

thorns, and that he was contented with the title of Defender of the Holy Sepulchre. . . .

The life of this great and good prince was short, but it was active and important. The conquest of Jerusalem itself, a place regarded with nearly as much veneration by the Mussulmen as by the Christians, was calculated to rouse the whole Mahommedan world to arms, and the necessity of proving to the enemies of the Cross that the Christians were able to defend, as well as recover, the Holy Land, was soon shown by the assembling of a large Saracen army in the neighbourhood of Ascalon, within a very short distance of the capital.

Godfrey and his companions immediately marched from Jerusalem to attack the Vizier, and both armies prepared for a decisive battle. The enemy remained waiting the attack, but the charge of the Crusaders was so impetuous that the Mussulmen do not seem to have resisted for a moment.

Their numbers were so great that they embarrassed each other in the flight, and the slaughter which took place was tremendous. The series of victories which had attended the arms of the Crusaders, thus crowned by such a splendid triumph, drove the Mahommedan population of Syria to despair; and multitudes, both of Turks and Egyptians, now fled from the country which had been conquered by warriors of their own faith more than three centuries before, and took refuge in Persia, Arabia, and Egypt. Several of the Mussulman towns, however, were suffered to remain under their own princes, upon condition of paying tribute; and indeed for a considerable time after the conquest of Jerusalem the forces of the newly-established Christian kingdom were too small for the subjection of the whole territory. The power of the Christian princes was afterwards greatly increased by the influx of Crusaders from Europe; but before any such accession of strength was received by the infant kingdom, Godfrey himself was taken ill, on his return from a distant expedition, and died in July, A.D. 1100, at the age of forty, having reigned not quite one year.1 1 Abridged from chap. i. vol. iii.

312

DEATH OF WILLIAM RUFUS, AND ACCESSION OF
HENRY THE FIRST.

A.D. IIOO.

From "History of England and Normandy," by SIR F. Palgrave.

A. D. WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR had been fully able to subjugate 1100 the English, but the extreme vexation they sustained from the rigour of his forest laws well-nigh destroyed the empire he founded. Violations of a law higher than the law of nature, those abuses of the power over the earth and the earth's products, which man possesses by delegation and not as an inherent right, have continued to be the source of discontent and resistance from generation to generation. The hateful forest laws assisted in placing our first Charles upon the scaffold; and, in a scarcely mitigated form, continue to embitter the poor against the rich at the present day. This code was not William's-it was Canute's; but the cruelty with which the Conqueror extended and enforced the odious jurisprudence occasioned unmitigated horror. The New Forest of Hampshire, as the ancient Jetten-Wald, the Weald of Giants, now began to be called, was deemed the consummation of selfish cruelty.... And of all the sins committed by William, none, in popular opinion, ought to have hung heavier on his soul than the merciless selfishness which had driven away the inhabitants, sparing neither the home of man nor the house of God, to give range for the hound and room for the deer.

The vestiges of the former populations which whilome cheered the Jetten-Wald, rendered the royal solitude more ununnatural and desolate; they testified against the waste of tyranny.

The years circling on since the Conqueror's death had rendered the scene more pensive and more lovely. The tofts where the cottages once stood no longer betrayed the fresh

tokens of desolation. The door had been broken away from the hinges, the ground-plot overgrown with gorse and fern, the hearth-stone concealed by heath and harebell; the unroofed and dilapidated chancel was tapestried with ivy, and the bright foxglove and sweet twining honeysuckle adorned and perfumed the altar, springing amidst the rifted slabs, watered by the dews of heaven.

Amongst the sixty churches which had been ruined, the sanctuary below the mystic Malwood1 was peculiarly remarkable; all around had been stamped by Rufus as peculiarly his own. You reach the Malwood easily from the leafy lodge in the favourite deer-walk, the Lind-hurst, the Dragon's-wood, where Rufus was wont to bouse and carouse, preparing for the sport ending with "the breaking of the deer," the joyous butchery. A scanty and gloomy inhabitancy dwelt dispersed amidst the vast silence of this magnificent desolation; the forest-swains, grudging against the King's delights; fierce and burly prickers and keepers, their coarse natures aggravated by the cruelty of their calling and their privileged impunity in all acts of oppression and wrong; here and there the grim charcoal-burner, whose employment, like that of his cousin-miners, was often hereditary, and some few families of English churls, the relics of the peasantry evicted and rejected by their Sovereign.

If any vestiges of the primeval belief of the Teutons, any practices derived from their mystic rites, subsisted amongst the English people, -the augury disclosing futurity, the song bestowing fertility upon the field, the dire imprecation against the enemy, they would surely be fostered amongst such solitudes, now becoming more appalling. Nocturnal demons haunted the forests; grim riders on the coal-black steeds, whose horns resounded, driving before them loathly hounds with fiery eyes. More terrific, the visions of meridian day. In the full brightness of noon, when the sportsman galloped along the clear green paths-those forest roads in which some latent

1 Why Malwood should be called mystic we do not quite understand. Castle Malwood is a fort, nearly square, with a single vallum, and a rampart now covered with trees. The keeper's lodge stands where the keep once was. About a mile thence is Cadenham oak, which used to be sup posed to bud, like the Glastonbury thorn, on Christmas night.-C. M. Y.