Our modern prayer-book Matins is an accumulation and abridgment of Matins, Lauds, and Prime; our Evensong of Vespers and Compline. Terce, Sext, and Nones, which consisted mainly of portions of Psalm 119, with varying Versicles and Collects, are unrepresented in our Anglican office.
If the older reader is curious to learn of what Compline consisted, he may be told that its main features were Psalms 4, 31, 91, and 184; the hymn, Te Lucis ante Terminum, "Before the ending of the day."--H. A. & M. 15; and the Collect, "Lighten our Darkness."
[xx] Roll of the Conquerors.
These names are taken from a charter, long preserved in Battle Abbey, and quoted in the notes to Thierry's Norman Conquest. It gives a list of the principal warriors who fought at Hastings, whose names are afterwards found, much to their advantage, in Domesday Book. Many names now common, even amongst the poor, make their first appearance in England therein, besides the noble ones quoted in our text. We regret that our space does not allow us to give the roll, which is many columns in length.
[xxi] Ivo Taille-Bois.
This petty tyrant, of infamous memory, was the chief of the Angevin auxiliaries of William, who received as his reward the hand of Lucy, sister of the Earls Edwin and Morcar; and with her also received all the ancient domains of their family in the neighbourhood of the Camp of Refuge, which proximity did not augment his prosperity. The ancient chronicler of the Abbey of Croyland (Ingulf) says:
"All the people of that district honoured Ivo with the greatest attention, and supplicated him on bended knee, bestowed on him all the honour they could, and the services they were bound to render; still he did not repay their confidence, but tortured and harassed, worried and annoyed, imprisoned and tormented them, every day loading them with fresh burdens, till he drove them, by his cruelty, to seek other and milder lords. Against the monastery and the people of Croyland he raged with the utmost fury; he would chase their cattle with dogs, drown them in the lakes, mutilate them in various ways, or break their backs or legs."
It is pleasing to learn that he met some punishment for his evil deeds. Hereward took him prisoner, very ignominiously, and held him a captive for a long time, to the delight of the poor vassals; he fell under the displeasure of William Rufus, in 1089, as a partisan of Robert and was sent home to Anjou deprived of all his ill-gotten wealth. He was, however, allowed to return under Henry, and died of paralysis in 1114 at his manor of Spalding, where, the old chronicler pithily says, "he was buried amidst the loudly expressed exultation of all his neighbours."
[xxii] The Camp of Refuge.
There still exists, in the southeastern district of Lincolnshire and the northern part of Cambridgeshire, a vast extent of flat land, intersected in every direction by rivers and dykes, known as the fen country.