Looked round in vain. Another shock! Ah, me!
And the White Ship groan'd like a living thing
As the black waters rushed within her planks,
And mingled with the screams and shouts and fears
That filled all hearts and ears. But soon a boat

Was hauled to th' side;-within it stept the prince,

And ere the rest could follow, the brave crew
Which manned it, pushed away;—a look he cast
On the now reeling ship, and at the side

-Her clasp'd hands raised within the calm moon light,
And nothing saying-the young countess stood :
"Back! back again !" we heard prince William say,
"My sister must be saved or I will die."

Henry. Thank God for that!
Mariner.

And back he forced the boat,

But when within the spring of desperate men,
The small boat came, leaping as if from death,
But finding death more surely by their leap,
Knight, noble, seaman-aye, the timorous maid
Rushed struggling from the wreck; and with a plunge
Down went the tiny bark, and the white sea

Was streaked by pallid faces, uttering cries

That ne'er shall leave these ears; and 'mong them all
Clasping his sister with a look to Heaven,

Sank William.

Henry. This you saw ?

Mariner.

I did, my liege

And grasp'd the loosened cordage of the ship

That still lay quivering on the fatal rock,

And gained the mast. There all the night I stood
Alone amid that desert of blank sea,

Till the cold sun arose; and nothing moved-
Moveless and silent all; distant or near

No sound, but ever the unruffled tide

Lay 'neath the heaven a sheet of steel or glass.

Henry. Stay here and be my friend. You tell the tale

OPPRESSIONS OF THE PEOple.

Manly, as to a man. Hubert, these lips

Have smiled their last; the salt sea holds my joy.

317

Arnulf (coming forward). Better the salt sea than the crimson grave That your remorseless hand has dug for me.

I bade you think, when came death's bitterness,

On me and mine.

Henry.
Arnulf, the stroke of grief
That bruised my heart has broke the sceptre too.
Come hither, Yvo. He has press'd this hand
And looked upon that face; you never more
Shall feel his grasp nor stand within his eye ;—
But you shall live. Embrace your father, Yvo,
And be, a month, the comrade of his joy ;
Then come to me, and there shall be between us
A bond that nothing on this earth shall sever.

Oppressions of the People.

From the "Pictorial History of England."

Both the Conqueror and his son Henry have the character of having been strict administrators of the laws, and rigorously exact and severe in the punishment of offences against the public peace. The Saxon Chronicler says that, in the time of the former, a girl loaded with gold might have passed safely through all parts of the kingdom. In like manner the same authority tells us, that, under the government of Henry, "whoso bore his burden of gold and silver, durst no man say to him nought but good." The maintenance of so effective a system of police must, no doubt, have made a great difference between these reigns and those of Rufus and Stephen-in both of which robbery ranged the kingdom almost without restraint, and, in the latter especially, the whole land was almost given up as a prey to anarchy and the power of

the strongest. But still even this supremacy of the law was in many respects an oppressive bondage to the subject. In this, as in everything else, the main object of the government was the protection and augmentation of the royal revenue; and it may be correctly enough affirmed, that private robbery and depredation were prohibited and punished chiefly on the principle that no interference was to be tolerated with the rights of the great public robber, the Government. Many of the laws, also, which were so sternly enforced, were in reality most unjust and grievous restrictions upon the people. Of this character, in particular, were the forest laws, which punished a trespass upon the royal huntinggrounds, or the slaughter of a wild beast, with the same penalty that was inflicted upon the robber or the murderer. And in all cases the vengeance of the law was wreaked upon its victims in a spirit so precipitate, reckless, and merciless, that any salutary effect of the example must have been to a great extent neutralized by its tending to harden and brutalize the public mind; and the most cruel injustice must have been often perpetrated in the name and under the direct authority of the law.

Henry I. was popularly called the Lion of Justice, and he well deserved the name. His mode of judicial procedure was in the highest degree summary and sweeping. In the twenty-fifth year of his reign, for instance, in a fit of furious indignation occasioned by the continued and increasing debasement of the coin, he had all the moneyers in the kingdom, to the number of more than fifty, brought up before the Court of Exchequer, when, after a short examination by the treasurer, they were all, except four, taken one by one into an adjoining apartment, and punished by having their right hands struck off, and being otherwise mutilated. The year before he had hanged at one time, at Huncot, in Leicestershire, no fewer than forty-four persons, charged with highway robbery. Robberies, however, of the most atrocious description were, during a great part of the reign, perpetrated, without check, by the immediate servants, and it may be said under the very orders of the Crown. The insolence of the purveyors and numerous followers of the court in the royal progresses is described by contemporary

OPPRESSIONS OF THE PEOPLE.

319

writers as having reached a height under this king far transcending even what it had attained to under either of his immediate predecessors. They used not only to enter the houses of the farmers and peasantry without leave asked, to take up their lodgings and remain as long as it suited them, and to eat and drink their fill of whatever they found, but, in the wantonness of their official licence, frequently even to burn or otherwise destroy what they could not consume. At other times they would carry it away with them, and sell it. If the owners ventured to remonstrate, their houses would probably be set on fire about their ears, or mutilation, and sometimes even death, might punish their presumption. Nor was it their goods only that were plundered or wasted; the honour of their wives and daughters was equally a

free

prey to these swarms of protected spoilers. The approach of the king to any district, accordingly, spread as much dread as could have been occasioned by an announcement that a public enemy was at hand. The inhabitants were wont to conceal whatever they had, and flee to the woods.

It was not till the necessity of reforming these frightful abuses was at last forced upon Henry, by the solitude which he found around him wherever he appeared,-in other words, till this system of unrestrained rapacity came at last to defeat its own purpose, that he had some of the delinquents brought before him, and punished by the amputation of a hand or a foot, or the extraction of one of their eyes. Yet the most unsparing pillage of the people in other forms continued throughout the whole of this reign. Taxes were imposed with no reference to any other consideration except the wants of the crown; and the raising of the money was managed by any measures, however violent or irregular, that would serve that end. It is an affecting trait of the sufferings of one numerous class of the people which is recorded by the historian Eadmer, in his statement that the peasantry on the domains of the crown would sometimes offer to give up their ploughs to the king, in their inability to pay the heavy exactions with which they were burdened. These unhappy men, it is to be remembered, were without any means of from the extortion

escape

which thus ground them to the earth; even if, in some cases, they were not attached to the soil by any legal bond, they might still be considered as rooted to it nearly as much as the trees that grew on it; for in that state of society there was, generally speaking, no resource for the great body of the community except to remain in the sphere in which they were born, and in which their fathers had moved.

The same historian paints in strong colours the miseries occasioned by the oppressiveness of the general taxes. The collectors, he says, seemed to have no sense either of humanity or justice. It was equally unfortunate for a man to be possessed of money as to be without it. In the latter case, he was cast into prison, or obliged to flee from the country; or his goods were taken and sold; the very door of his house being sometimes carried away as a punishment for not satisfying the demand made upon him. But, if he had money, it was no better; his wealth was only a provocation to the rapacity of the government, which never ceased to harass him by threats of prosecutions on unfounded charges or by some of the other means of extortion at its command, until it drove him to comply with its most unjust requisitions. The language of the Saxon chronicler is to the same purport, and equally strong. "God knows,” says that other contemporary writer, "how unjustly this miserable people is dealt with. First they are deprived of their property, and then they are put to death. If a man possesses anything it is taken from him; if he has nothing, he is left to perish by famine."

A legend respecting Henry I., which is related by some of the old historians, forcibly depicts the deep sense that was popularly entertained of the tyranny of his government, and the fierce hatred which it engendered in the hearts of his subjects. In the year 1130, as he was passing over to Normandy, he is said to have been visited one night with an extraordinary dream or vision. First, there gathered around him a multitude of countrymen, bearing scythes, spades, and pitch-forks, and with anger and threatening in their countenances: they passed away, and the place they had occupied was filled by a crowd of armed