Page 66 of 155

     [* Gul. Gemet. p. 290. Order. Vitalis, p. 513.
     Anglia Sacra, TO! I. p. 216.]

     [** Order. Vitalis, p. 512. Chron. de Mailr. p.
     116. Hoveden, p. 450. M. Paris, p. 5. Sim. Dunelm. p. 198.]

     [*** Order. Vitalis, p. 512.]

     [**** Order. Vitalis, p. 513. Hoveden, p. 451.]
     Burgo, p. 47.]

Edric the Forester, calling in the assistance of the Welsh, laid siege to Shrewsbury, and made head against Earl Brient and Fitz-Osberne, who commanded in those quarters.[*] The English, everywhere repenting their former easy submission, seemed determined to make by concert one great effort for the recovery of their liberties, and for the expulsion of their oppressors.

William, undismayed amidst this scene of confusion, assembled. his forces, and animating them with the prospect of new confiscations and forfeitures, he marched against the rebels in the north, whom he regarded as the most formidable, and whose defeat, he knew, would strike a terror into all the other malecontents. Joining policy to force, he tried, before his approach, to weaken the enemy, by detaching the Danes from them; and he engaged Osberne, by large presents, and by offering him the liberty of plundering the sea-coast, to retire without committing farther hostilities into Denmark.[**] Cospatric also, in despair of success, made his peace with the king, and paying a sum of money as an atonement for his insurrection, was received into favor, and even invested with the earldom of Northumberland. Waltheof, who long defended York with great courage, was allured with this appearance of clemency; and as William knew how to esteem valor, even in an enemy, that nobleman had no reason to repent of this confidence.[***] Even Edric, compelled by necessity, submitted to the conqueror, and received forgiveness, which was soon after followed by some degree of trust and favor. Malcolm, coming too late to support his confederates, was constrained to retire; and all the English rebels in other parts, except Hereward, who still kept in his fastnesses, dispersed themselves, and left the Normans undisputed masters of the kingdom. Edgar Atheling, with his followers, sought again a retreat in Scotland from the pursuit of his enemies.

     [* Order. Vitalis, p. 514.]

     [** Hoveden, p. 451. Chron. Abb. St. Petri de
     Burgo, p. 47. Sim Dunelm. p. 199.]

     [*** W. Malms, p. 104. H. Hunting, p. 369.]

1070.

But the seeming clemency of William toward the English leaders, proceeded only from artifice, or from his esteem of individuals: his heart, was hardened against all compassion towards the people, and he scrupled no measure, however violent or severe, which seemed requisite to support his plan of tyrannical administration. Sensible of the restless disposition of the Northumbrians, he determined to incapacitate them even after from giving him disturbance; and he issued orders for laying entirely waste that fertile country, which, for the extent of sixty miles, lies between the Humber and the Tees.[*] The houses were reduced to ashes by the merciless Normans; the cattle seized and driven away; the instruments of husbandry destroyed; and the inhabitants compelled either to seek for a subsistence in the southern parts of Scotland, or if they lingered in England, from a reluctance to abandon their ancient habitations, they perished miserably in the woods from cold and hunger. The lives of a hundred thousand persons are computed to have been sacrificed to this stroke of barbarous policy,[**] which, by seeking a remedy for a temporary evil, thus inflicted a lasting wound on the power and populousness of the nation.

But William, finding himself entirely master of a people who had given him such sensible proofs of their impotent rage and animosity, now resolved to proceed to extremities against all the natives of England; and to reduce them to a condition in which they should no longer be formidable to his government. The insurrections and conspiracies in so many parts of the kingdom had involved the bulk of the landed proprietors, more or less, in the guilt of treason; and the king took advantage of executing against them, with the utmost rigor, the laws of forfeiture and attainder. Their lives were, indeed, commonly spared; but their estates were confiscated, and either annexed to the royal demesnes, or conferred with the most profuse bounty, on the Normans and other foreigners.[***] While the king’s declared intention was to depress, or rather entirely extirpate, the English gentry,[****] 8 it is easy to believe that scarcely the form of justice would be observed in those violent proceedings;[*****] and that any suspicions served as the most undoubted proofs of guilt against a people thus devoted to destruction.

     [* Chron. Sax. p. 174. Ingulph. p. 79. W. Malms,
     p. 103. Hoveden, p. 451. Chron. Abb. St. Petri de Burgo, p.
     47. M. Paris, p. 5. Sim. Dunelm. p. 199. Brompton, p. 966.
     Knyghton, p. 2344. Anglia Sacra, vol. i. p, 702.]

     [** Order. Vitalis, p. 515.]

     [*** W. Malms, p. 104.]

     [**** H. Hunting, p. 370.]

It was crime sufficient in an Englishman to be opulent, or noble, or powerful; and the policy of the king, concurring with the rapacity of foreign adventurers, produced almost a total revolution in the landed property of the kingdom. Ancient and honorable families were reduced to beggary; the nobles themselves were every where treated with ignominy and contempt; they had the mortification of seeing their castles and manors possessed by Normans of the meanest birth and lowest stations;[*] and they found themselves carefully excluded from every road which led either to riches or preferment.[**] 9

As power naturally follows property, this revolution alone gave great security to the foreigners; but William, by the new institutions which he established, took also care to retain forever the military authority in those hands which had enabled him to subdue the kingdom. He introduced into England the feudal law, which he found established in France and Normandy, and which, during that age, was the foundation both of the stability and of the disorders in most of the monarchical governments of Europe. He divided all the lands of England, with very few exceptions, beside the royal demesnes, into baronies; and he conferred these, with the reservation of stated services and payments, on the most considerable of his adventurers. These great barons, who held immediately of the crown, shared out a great part of their lands to other foreigners, who were denominated knights or vassals, and who paid their lord the same duty and submission, in peace and war, which he himself owed, to his sovereign. The whole kingdom contained about seven hundred chief tenants, and sixty thousand two hundred and fifteen knights’ fees;[***] and as none of the native English were admitted into the first rank, the few who retained their landed property were glad to be received into the second, and, under the protection of some powerful Norman, to load themselves and their posterity with this grievous burden, for estates which they had received free from their ancestors.[****] The small mixture of English which entered into this civil or military fabric, (for it partook of both species,) was so restrained by subordination under the foreigners, that the Norman dominion seemed now to be fixed on the most durable basis, and to defy all the efforts of its enemies.