CHAPTER III.

ENGLAND UNDER THE YOKE.

NECESSITIES OF DESPOTISM-SUPPRESSION OF THE ANGLO-SAXON SYSTEM AND LANGUAGE CONFISCATION-THE NEW FOREST AND FOREST LAWS-TYRANNY OF THE KING OVER THE NOBLES-EXACT DEFINITION OF CONQUEST-REMNANTS AND TRADITIONS OF THE SAXON SYSTEM-CHARTERS-RUFUS-HENRY I. STEPHEN-MATILDA-HENRY II.-RICHARD II.--FIRST IMPEACHMENT BY

PARLIAMENT.

DESPOTIC power can only be sustained by acts of despotism. In the idea of subjection to the will of a mere mortal, there is something so revolting to our nature that the bare conception rouses an involuntary spirit of resistance. Despotism is war with human nature; and the first necessity of despots is defence against the instincts of mankind. The necessities of their position force them to crush out the spirit of resistance to their usurpation. It is not enough to crush resistance. They must crush the spirit which inspires resistance, or they cannot be secure. It is a combat a l'outrance. The law of self-defence demands relentless war upon their foe, and that foe is the nature God has breathed into the nostrils of mankind. Hence it is that tyrants, naturally amiable and humane, have not unfrequently become the scourges of their race. Compelled at first to use brute force against their open enemies, and then to wage a ceaseless warfare with their hidden foe, in the heart of every man worthy of the name of freeman, habit has at last brought them to be willingly what tyrants must be actually -enemies of man. Self-preservation, calling for continual intimidation, leads to an inveterate habit of trampling on all human rights and obligations, till the tyrant learns that his true enemy is human nature. Then his task is clear. The arm of power and the

allurements of temptation are his only instruments; and he becomes the corrupter and destroyer of his race.

The English people felt the full force of these horrible necessities during the first five Norman reigns. Under the iron hand of William, almost every vestige of the Anglo-Saxon system disappeared. The great mass of the freemen were disfranchised and made serfs. The ealdormen and eorls were attainted and exiled, and their lands delivered to the Norman followers of the king. The AngloSaxon priests and prelates were degraded from their offices, and Norman creatures of the king appointed in their stead, The Saxon language was proscribed, and the procedures of the courts required to be in Norman French. The native people, ground down by exactions and exasperated by the insults heaped upon them by their foreign masters, were lashed into occasional revolt; and thus furnished to the king pretexts for further confiscations, and excuses for more violent oppressions. From the Domesday Book we learn that of seven hundred tenants in capite, or immediate vassals of the crown, not one was a Saxon; and though of the 60,215 knights' fees in England, it is probable that some-perhaps many-were still held by Saxons, we must recollect that they were now no longer freeholders, but were compelled to surrender their own lands into the hands of Norman barons, and to receive them back as vassals, burdened with the usual imposts of the feudal tenure. As the landless Saxon freemen were degraded into serfs, so were the free proprietors of lands degraded into feudal vassals.

Thus the people felt the full weight of the conqueror's heel. But the necessities of arbitrary power demand intimidation of its subjects, and the conqueror proceeded to strike terror to the people's hearts by acts of ruthless cruelty which, if not prompted by this cause, could only be described as acts of fiendish wantonness. Under the thin pretence that he was apprehensive of a Danish invasion, he caused the whole region from the Tyne to the Humber to be laid waste. Thousands of the people died of want beside the ruins of their wasted homes; and for nine years, thoughout the desolated district there was not one village-scarcely one houseleft for human occupation. Fear of an invasion, flimsy as the reason was, was yet some reason for this wholesale cruelty; but no excuse

was even attempted for a similar destruction, both of life and property, caused in the making of the king's "New Forest." Thousands of persons died of hunger, that the king's deer might be fed. Thousands of homes were given to the torch, that in their ruins the wild boar might make his lair. Thousands of acres were withdrawn from cultivation for the use and benefit of man, to furnish pastures for the royal game. And if the starving Saxon churl presumed to kill a boar or deer, his punishment was the loss of his eyes. This trampling on the common instincts of humanity was not mere wantonness. It was part of the policy of the conqueror, and was intended to inspire his subjects with a terror of his power. To overawe his Norman as well as his Saxon vassals, he kept up a standing army of mercenary soldiers from the Continent, and their support he furnished by the manifold exactions which the feudal system gave the opportunity of making. The comparative smallness of the fiefs enabled him to put down that pernicious system of marauding by the barons which prevailed upon the Continent. This he did, not as an act of justice, but as a means of making his power felt and respected. In his realm of England he endured no robber but himself. Rightly, indeed, does Hallam say that “England had passed under the yoke; " yet England bore no other yoke than that which any free people must endure which yields its freedom to the hand of foreign or domestic usurpation. The necessities of tyranny are every where the same. It has the same position to maintain; the same war with the inborn instincts of mankind to wage; the same means of corruption and intimidation to apply; and the same heartless recklessness in working out its aims.'

It was not long before the Normans, under William and his immediate successors, found out that the royal despotism was not a despotism merely to the Saxons. With that they might have been content; but they were not long in discovering that they themselves were as much objects of oppression to their sovereign as the subjugated Saxons. The effect of this was to make common cause between them and the Saxons as against the crown: and it is singular to notice that the causes which eventually led to the deliverance both from kingly tyranny were the few remnants of the ancient Saxon institutions that had been permitted to remain. William did not

affect to have conquered England, but to have conquered the crown of England; the term conquest not being in feudal language understood in its modern sense, but signifying simply acquisition in any way other than by inheritance; and as William claimed to have acquired the crown, not by inheritance, but by a real or pretended grant from Edward the Confessor, and was thus the original acquirer of it to his family, he was called the conqueror, i. e., the acquirer of the crown of England. He did not consequently pretend to have subjugated England by the sword, but by the sword to have won his rightful crown from Harold. At his coronation he took the same oaths as the Saxon kings had taken theretofore, and swore in the same formula to support and defend the laws of the realm. It is true that William, like more modern rulers, held official oaths but lightly, and completely overturned the Anglo-Saxon constitutions. Yet in some respects the former institutions still remained. The shire and burgh courts-now called courts of assize-and the hundred courts-now called the quarter sessions—continued to be held. In these the ancient laws and customs of the kingdom were preserved; in many matters they retained that local sovereignty which was their great characteristic before the Conquest; and in all of them tradition still spoke of a time when laws and statutes were not emanations from the arbitrary will of a despotic king, but were enacted by a free and independent council of the kingdom, to whose laws the prince and people were alike amenable. Thus the idea of constitutional government was preserved. When groaning under the oppressions of the kings, the Norman barons, no less than the Saxons, clamored for the laws of Edward the Confessor; and as the necessities of the crown afforded opportunity, they called for and obtained successive charters recognizing the ancient Saxon laws. Such charters were, however, always looked upon as acts of royal grace. No parliament or council ventured to assume the functions of the Saxon witena-gemote; nor, till the time of Richard I. did Parliament assert any authority beyond that of a council of advice. In their subjection to the throne, their only hope lay in the partial recollection of the ancient liberties of England, which was kept alive by a few feeble remnants of the Anglo-Saxon polity.

For a hundred and fifty years after the Conquest, the history of

England, so far as it relates to constitutional developments, may be summed up in a few sentences.

WILLIAM RUFUS, the immediate successor of the Conqueror, followed in the footsteps of his father, and extended his oppressions to the church. He seized upon the temporalities of vacant bishoprics and abbeys, and delayed appointments to them, that he might continue to enjoy their revenues. In many instances he sold or gave away the church lands to his favorites. When he purchased the duchy of Normandy from his brother Robert for 10,000 marks, this sum was raised by general extortions both from church and laity, so rigorous that convents were compelled to melt their plate in order to supply the amounts required of them.2

HENRY I., having usurped the crown in defiance of the right of his brother Robert, duke of Normandy, endeavored to secure himself in his possession by concessions to his subjects. He immediately gave a charter which professed to do away with the abuses of his predecessor's reign; and as an earnest of his purpose he degraded and imprisoned Ralph Flambard, bishop of Durham, who had been the agent of his brother's tyranny. He also reconciled the Saxons to his government by marrying Matilda, daughter of Malcolm III. of Scotland, and niece to Edgar Atheling. Thus both the Normans and the Saxons looked to better days under the rule of Henry; but though by no means so unscrupulous a prince as Rufus, he had hardly given his charter before he broke it by seizing on the temporalities of the see of Durham, which he held for five years; and when he went on his invasion of Normandy, he raised the means for his expedition by exactions not less ruinous than those of Rufus.

STEPHEN, a usurper like his predecessor, sought, like him, to win the barons to his cause by a pretended abolition of abuses. He gave a solemn charter in which he promised that church benefices falling vacant should immediately be filled, and that the crown should no more seize their temporalities; that the royal forests should be diminished; that certain obnoxious taxes levied for fictitious purposes should be abolished, and that the wholesome laws of Edward the Confessor should be restored. To win the favor of the barons, he allowed them privileges hitherto unknown. The