the capital, and, with the usual magnanimity of the time, determined, if he could not enjoy the territory himself, he would render it unfit for his rival's enjoyment. Frightful stories are told of the cruelty of his march-his plunder and devastation, and finally his conflagration of the fair city when it threw itself on his compassion. Amid the blazing buildings the fierce old man rode grimly on, when suddenly his horse stepped upon the embers, and in its struggles to maintain its footing, shook the rider so severely, that he was forced to dismount. He was with difficulty carried in a litter to Rouen, and soon it became evident his end was come. He retired to a monastery in the neighbourhood, and felt some compunctious visitings for the evils he had caused. He ordered large sums to be spent in the erection of churches in England and his other States; he pardoned his enemies, among whom it gives us a strange evidence of the rapidity of the changes which had taken place to observe the names of the Saxon earls, Morcar and Beorn, and the surviving brother of Harold. After generously delivering these warriors from their confinement, where they had lingered twenty years, he turned to his family arrangements. Of his three sons, Robert, the eldest, was the best in disposition, William was the highest in his father's favour, and Henry was the most educated and refined. To the hated heir he left the Dukedom of Normandy; to William he recommended an immediate journey to England, without publicly stating the reason of the advice; and to Henry he left five thousand pounds in silver, with an almost prophetical intimation that great things were in store for him. His sons took him at his word, and left him before he died. His attendants waited impatiently to follow the example, and when the Conqueror eventually expired, they hurried from the place, taking with them all the gold and valuables they could find, leaving the inanimate body unhouseled, unanointed, unaneled, and dependent for the decencies of burial on the Christian tenderness of a private man. Yet the decencies of the tomb were strangely interrupted even at

A.D. 1070-1087.] DEATH AND CHARACTER OF WILLIAM. 119

last. When they were about to lay him in the grave at Caen, Asselin, the son of Arthur, stood upon the soil, and said, "This is mine; the dead unjustly despoiled me of it, and I will not let him lie in the land he robbed me of." The abbot in attendance paid a small sum, and promised more; and when the dispute was settled, the opening was found too small to receive the coffin. Force was used to fit it in, and the man at whose name the world grew pale, lay exposed and mangled among the fragments of the broken wood which the attendants had pushed downward with their spears.

A man of strong will and unbridled ambition was taken away. No little redeeming traits of tenderness in private life are related of this incarnation of cruelty and power. His sword seemed always in his hand, and his crown on his head, as if he were merely a warrior and ruler, with none of the lower and more attractive qualities which we meet with in other men. Can it be possible that in all his sixty years of work and will he never gave way to the free mirth which makes companionship delightful ?-did he never laugh, or jest, or dance, or feel happy he knew not why, or forget that he was a king? We are to remember that the accounts we have of him are principally from English sources; that the man of blood, who depopulated the country, and burnt down monasteries, and filled the bishoprics with foreigners, and impoverished the English people, and rode rough-shod over the laws of Alfred and the liberties of Edward the Confessor, was a kind of embodied evil whom it was impossible for his English describers to endow with human feelings. Probably a companion of his relaxation might have told a different story-might have told of his generosity to poor Norman friends, of his kindness to his sons, his affection to his wife, his passion for architecture, and his liberality to the Church. His treasures were poured forth in the erection of abbeys and cathedrals, which continue the purest models of the combination of massiveness of effect with gracefulness of detail which architectural science has produced

If it be true that these noble works, with which he supplied his native dukedom and his acquired dominion, were the results as much of penitence for crimes as of a taste for building, we can form some estimate of the variety and extent of his sins. Wholesale murders were commemorated and atoned for by many a long-drawn aisle and fretted vault, while an unjust sentence on an English Franklin was perhaps succeeded by a humble chantry or the enlargement of a village tower. We find, accordingly, that on his death-bed, near Rouen, one of his last orders was to restore the chapels and convents he had burned in France, and to build monasteries and churches with endowments for the poor in every county in England, "in compensation," says the English chronicler, "of the robberies he had committed." If allowance is made for the prejudices of his historians, and the general barbarism of the time, William will emerge as a man of a deeply-sagacious mind, working out a great object with not more unscrupulousness than any of his contemporaries; who, if gifted with few virtues that attract affection, had none of the littlenesses that excite contempt.

A.D.

LANDMARKS OF CHRONOLOGY.

1066. William Duke of Normandy claims the crown of England as the gift of Edward the Confessor. Battle of Hastings, in which Harold is slain, William is crowned at Westminster. 1067. William commits the care of England to his half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, and William Fitz-Osborne, Earl of Hereford.

1068. The tax of Dane-gelt re-established, and numerous castles built. The ringing of the curfew-bell.

1069. The lands of England distributed among the Normans. Several insurrections thereby created.

1070. William compels all bishoprics and abbeys to hold them by

CHAPTER II.

WILLIAM THE SECOND (RUFUS).

A.D. 1087 TO A.D. 1100.

CONTEMPORARY SOVEREIGNS.

FRANCE.-Philip I,, the Fair.

SCOTLAND.-Malcolm III., Canmore; Donald VII,, the Bane;
Duncan II.; Edgar.

POPES.-Victor III.; Urban II.; Pascal II.

§ 1. Accession of WILLIAM II. (Rufus).—§ 2. Conspiracies formed against the new sovereign. Quarrels among the Normans.-§ 3. Rebellion of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux.-§ 4. The relative positions of England and the Duchy of Normandy. Quarrels between the king and his brother Robert, Duke of Normandy.-§ 5. Interest of the Norman barons in uniting England and Normandy under the same sovereign. Henry of Normandy. Robert's amiable character.-§ 6. Character of William. A tyrant and a bigot. Death of the learned Lanfranc.$7. William seeks a quarrel with Scotland, and defeats King Malcolm. § 8. Excessive taxation and general discontent. Conspiracy of the Norman lords.-§ 9. Commencement of the Crusades. Peter the Hermit. Godfrey de Bouillon.-§ 10. Robert of Normandy pledges the ducal crown to enable him to join the Crusaders. William's continued exactions.-§ 11. Contests between the Church and State. Quarrel with Archbishop Anselm. Struggle between the throne and the Pope.-§ 12. William shot by an arrow. Dies equally detested by England and the Normans.-§ 13. Various conjectures as to his death.

§ 1. WHEN the Conqueror lay at the point of death, and was making a disposition of his States, he had nominated his eldest son Robert to the duchy of Normandy, but declined to appoint any of his sons to the throne of England. It was too great a kingdom, he said, to be disposed of like a hereditary fief. At the same time he had given some private counsel to his favourite William; and we are now to judge from what occurred what that counsel must have been. William, strong

bodied like his father, red-haired, and hot-tempered, coarse, cruel, and revengeful, knew that he was unpopular with the Norman lords; he therefore concealed the king's death till he had won over Lanfranc, the archbishop, to his cause by a promise of implicit obedience; he then hurried to Winchester, and claimed the royal treasures, which were very large; and when he saw himself in possession of the favour of the Church, and was lord of the castles of Dover, Hastings, and Pevensey, and of sixty thousand pounds weight of silver, besides great store of gold and jewels, he hurriedly summoned a council of the lords spiritual and temporal to give him the semblance of a legitimate election. By fear and favour he gained the object of his ambition, and was crowned at Westminster within three weeks of his father's death (September 26, 1087).

§ 2. A gleam of hope even at this early period broke in upon the English people. They saw disunion and enmity spreading from day to day among the Normans; they heard of conspiracies among those hated settlers to resist the newlyelected king, and they must have learned how valuable they were still considered by the efforts of both parties to win them over to their cause. William assumed the airs of a kind and just sovereign, who was determined to amend the harsh regulations of his father. He promised the English gentry a relaxation of the game-laws, and the peasantry an amelioration of their lot; but the necessities of his position soon forced him to greater condescensions than these, for he perceived that the growing hostility of the barons could only be checked by the armed assistance of the natives; and in less than a year from the removal of the Conqueror there were English vessels guarding the seas against a new Norman invasion, and thirty thousand armed Englishmen to defend their country if the invaders escaped the ships.

The reason of the quarrel among the Normans was this: if Normandy and England were in different hands, the pro