It was here no question of 'the laws and rights of Englishmen':[35] it was to no folkmoot that William Rufus spoke. When we read of the King in his court, composed of his tenants-in-chief,[36] as surrounded by 'no small part of the nation',[37] when we hear of the mass of 'the Assembly ... crying Yea, yea';[38] when we learn that 'a great numerical proportion, most likely a numerical majority, were natives',[39] we are fairly prepared for the astounding statement that:
The wide fields which had seen the great review and the great homage in the days of the elder William, could alone hold the crowd which came together to share in the great court of doom which was holden by the younger.[40]
For we see that in all these fantasies of a brain viewing plain facts through a mist of moots and 'witan', we have what can only be termed history in masquerade.
[1] Stubbs' Const. Hist. (1874), i. 510.
[2] ibid., p. 577.
[3] Select Charters (1870), pp. 28-9. So too, preface to Rog. Hoveden (1871): 'It may be placed on a par with St Thomas's opposition to Henry II in 1163' (iv., pp. xci-xcii). So also Early Plantagenets (1876), p. 126, and Const. Hist., i. 510.
[4] Norm. Conq., v. 675, 695.
[5] See above, p. 377.
[6] Early Plantagenets, p. 126.
[7] Const. Hist., i. 509.