Hardened and embittered by the selfish treasons that had beset his early boyhood, and which had forced him into manhood before his time, he came to England as one called thither by the late king’s designation, and, therefore, the lawful heir. The Norman law, a confusion of the old Frank and Roman codes, and of the Norwegian pirate customs, he seems to have been glad to leave behind. His native Normans must be ruled by it, but he was an English king by inheritance, and English laws he would observe; Englishmen should have their national share in the royal favor, and in their native land.
But the design proved impracticable. The English had been split into fierce parties long before he came, and the West Saxon, the Mercian Angle, and Northumbrian Dane hated one another still, and all hated the Norman alike; and his Norman, French, and Breton importations lost no love among themselves, and viewed the English natives as conquered beings, whose spoil was unjustly withheld from them by the Duke King.
Rebellion began: by ones, twos, and threes, the nobles revolted, and were stamped out by William’s iron heel, suffering his fierce, unrelenting justice—that highest justice that according to the Latin proverb becomes, in man’s mind at least, the highest injustice. So England lay, trampled, bleeding, indignant, and raising a loud cry of misery; but, in real truth, the sufferers were in the first place the actual rebels, Saxon and Norman alike; next, those districts which had risen against his authority, and were barbarously devastated with fire and sword; and lastly, the places which, by the death or forfeiture of native lords, or by the enforced marriage of heiresses, fell into the hands of rapacious Norman adventurers, who treated their serfs with the brutal violence common in France.
Otherwise, things were left much as they were. The towns had little or no cause of complaint, and the lesser Saxon gentry, with the Franklins and the Earls, were unmolested, unless they happened to have vicious neighbors. The Curfew bell, about which so great a clamor was raised, was a universal regulation in Europe; it was a call to prayers, an intimation that it was bedtime, and a means of guarding against fire, when streets were often nothing but wooden booths thatched. The intense hatred that its introduction caused was only the true English dislike to anything like domiciliary interference.
The King has left us an undoubted testimony to the condition of the country, and the number of Saxons still holding tenures. Nineteen years after his Conquest, he held a council at Gloucester, the result of which was a great “numbering of the people”—a general census. To every city or town, commissioners were sent forth, who collected together the Shire reeve or Sheriff—the Viscount, as the Normans called him—the thegus, the parish priests, the reeves, and franklins, who were examined upon oath of the numbers, names, and holdings of the men of their place, both as they were in King Edward’s days, and at that time. The lands had to be de scribed, whether plough lands or pasture, wood or waste; the mills and fisheries wore recorded, and each farmer’s stock of oxen, cows, sheep, or swine. The English grumbled at the inquiry, called it tyranny, and expected worse to come of it, but there was no real cause for complaint. The primary object of the survey was the land-tax, the Danegeld, as it was called, because it was first raised to provide defences against the Danes, and every portion of arable land was assessed at a fair rate, according to ancient custom, but not that which lay waste. The entire record, including all England save London and the four northern counties, was preserved at Winchester, and called the Winchester Roll, or Domesday Book. It is one of the most interesting records in existence, showing, as it does, the exceeding antiquity of our existing divisions of townships, parishes and estates, and even of the families inhabiting them, of whom a fair proportion, chiefly of the lesser gentry, can point to evidence that they live on soil that was tilled by their fathers before the days of the Norman. It is far more satisfactory than the Battle Roll, which was much tampered with by the monks to gratify the ancestral vanity of gentlemen who were so persuaded that their ancestors ought to be found there, that they caused them to be inserted if they were missing. Of Domesday Book, however, there is no doubt, as the original copy is still extant in its fair old handwriting, showing the wonderful work that the French-speaking scribes made with English names of people and places. Queen Edith, the Confessor’s widow, who was a large landholder, appears as Eddeve, Adeve, Adiva—by anything but her true old English name of Eadgyth. But it was much that the subdued English folk appeared there at all.
The most real grievance that the English had to complain of was the Forest Laws. The Dukes of Normandy had had many a quarrel in their Neustrian home with their subjects, on the vexed question of the chase, their greatest passion; and when William came into England as a victor, he was determined to rule all his own way in the waste and woodland. All the forests he took into his own hands, and the saying was that “the king loved the high deer as if he was their father;” any trespass was severely punched, and if he slaughter of any kind of game was a more serious thing than murder itself.
Chief of all, however, in people’s minds, was his appropriation of the tract of Jettenwald, or the Giant’s Wood, Ytene, in South Hants. A tempting hunting-ground extended nearly all the way from his royal city of Winchester, broad, bare chalk down, passing into heathy common, and forest waste, covered with holly and yew, and with noble oak and beech in its dells, fit covert for the mighty boar, the high deer, and an infinity of game beside.
With William’s paternal feelings toward the deer, he thought the cotters and squatters, the churls and the serfs, on the borders of the wood, or in little clearings in the midst, mischievous interlopers, and at one swoop he expelled them all, and kept the Giant’s Wood solely for himself and his deer, by the still remaining name of the New Forest.
Chroniclers talk of twenty-two mother churches and fifty-two parishes laid waste, but there is no doubt that this was a monstrous exaggeration, and that the population could not have been so dense. At any rate, whatever their numbers, the inhabitants were expelled, the animals were left unmolested for seven years, and then the Norman king enjoyed his sports there among his fierce nobility, little recking that all the English, and many of the Normans, longed that a curse should there light upon his head, or on that of his proud sons.