On apace came the outer conquest into our inner peace. Towns and burghs went down, and the hungry flames of lust and avarice fed upon what they destroyed. All the vales and hills the swords of Hengist and Horsa had won, and baptized with foemen’s blood, in the mighty names of old Norsemen and Valhalla, were being christened anew to suit a mincing, latter tongue. Thane and franklin uncapped them at the roadside to these steel-bound swarms of ruthless spoilers, and nothing was sacred, neither deed nor covenant, neither having nor holding, which ran counter to the wishes of the western scourges of our English weakness.
When I thought of all this I was extraordinarily ill at ease, and, before I could settle upon how best to meet the danger, it came upon us, and we were overwhelmed. Briefly, it was thus: About twelve years after the battle where Harold had died, the Norman leader had, we heard, taken it into his head to poll us like cattle, to find the sum and total of our feus and lands, our serfs and orchards, and even of our very selves! Now, few of us Saxons but felt this was a certain scheme to tax and oppress us even more severely than the people had been oppressed in the time of St. Dunstan. Besides this, our free spirits rose in scorn of being counted and weighed and mulcted by plebeian emissaries of the usurper, so we murmured loud and long.
And those thanes who complained the bitterest were hanged by the derisive Normans on their own kitchen beams—on the very same hooks where they cured their mighty sides of pork—while those who complied but falsely with the assessor’s commands were robbed of wife and heritage, children and lands, and shackled with the brass collar of serfdom, or turned out to beg their living on the wayside and sue the charity of their own dependants. Whether we would thus be hanged or outcast, or whether we would humble us to this hateful need, writing ourselves and our serfs down in the great “Doom’s Day” book, all had to choose.
For my own part, after much debating, and for the sake of those who looked to me, I had determined to do what was required—and then, if it might be, to bring all the Saxon gentlemen together—to raise these English shires upon the Normans, and with fire and sword revoke our abominable indenture of thraldom. But, alas! my hasty temper and my inability to stomach an affront in any guise undid my good resolutions.
Well, this mighty book was being compiled far and wide, we heard, in every shire: there were some men of good standing base enough to countenance it, and, taking the name of the King’s justiciaries, they got together shorn monks—shaveling rascals who did the writing and computing—with reeves hungry for their masters’ woodlands, and many other lean forsworn villains. This jury of miscreants went round from hall to hall, from manor to manor, with their scrips and pens and parchment, until all the land was being gathered into the avaricious Norman’s tax roll.
They cast their greedy eyes at last on sunny, sleepy Voewood, though, indeed, I had implored every deity, old or new, I could recall that they might overlook it; and one day their hireling train of two score pikemen came ambling down the glades with a fat Abbot—a Norman rascal—at their head, and pulled up at our doorway.
“Hullo!” says the monk. “Whose house is this?”
“Mine,” I said gruffly, with a secret fancy that there would be some heads broken before the census was completed.
“And who are you?”
“The Master of Voewood.”