I should never have done, if I were to tell you all the changes that were made in dear old England by the Normans. But there is one I must try to explain to you, because it will help you to understand the rest of our history. When William was quite settled in England, which was not till after seven years, when the poor English were tired of trying to drive him and his Normans away, he took the houses and lands from the English thanes and earls, and gave them to the Norman noblemen, who were called barons.
This was unjust. But as the Normans had conquered the English, they were obliged to submit even to this. But William made an agreement with the barons to whom he gave the lands of the old thanes, that when he went to war they should go with him; that they should have those lands for themselves and their children, instead of being paid for fighting, as soldiers and their officers are now, and that they should bring with them horses and arms for themselves, and common men to fight also.
Some of the barons who had very large shares of land given to them, were bound to take a hundred men or more to the wars; some, who had less land, took fifty, or even twenty. The greatest barons had sometimes so much land, that it would have been troublesome to them to manage it all themselves; so they divided it among gentlemen whom they knew, and made them promise to go with them to the wars, and bring their servants, in the same manner as the great barons themselves did to the king.
Now these lands were called feuds, and the king was called the feudal lord of the barons, because they received the feud or piece of land from him, and they in return promised to serve him; and the great barons were called the feudal lords of the small barons, or gentlemen, for the same reason. And when these feuds were given by the king to the great baron, or by a great baron to another, the person to whom it was given knelt down before his feudal lord, and kissed his hand, and promised to serve him. This was called homage.
There is only one more thing that I shall tell you about William. He sent people to all parts of England, to see what towns and villages there were, and how many houses and people in them; and he had all the names written in a book called “Domesday Book.” Domesday means the day of judging, and this book enabled him to judge how much land he had, and how many men he could raise to fight for him.
At last King William died. He received a hurt from his horse being startled at the flames of a small town in France, which his soldiers had set on fire, and was carried to the Abbey of St. Gervase, near Rouen, where he died. He was Duke of Normandy and afterwards King of England, and is sometimes called William the Conqueror, because he conquered English Harold at the battle of Hastings. He was very cruel and very passionate; he took money and land from every one who offended him; and, as I have told you, vexed the English, and indeed all the poor, very much. And this is being a tyrant, rather than a king.
He had a very good wife, whose name was Matilda, but his sons were more like him than like their mother; however, you shall read about the two youngest of them, who came to be kings of England.
CHAPTER XV.
WILLIAM II.—1087 to 1100.
How William the Second and Robert of Normandy besieged their brother Henry in his castle; how William was killed in the New Forest, and how London Bridge and Westminster Hall were built in his reign.
As soon as William the Conqueror’s death was known in England, his second son, William, who was called Rufus, which means the Red, persuaded the noblemen in England to make him king, instead of his elder brother, Robert. I dare say the noblemen were soon sorry they did so; for although none of William the Conqueror’s sons were very good, this William Rufus was the worst of all. Robert became Duke of Normandy, but his brother William gave him a great deal of money, to let him govern the dukedom, while he went to fight in the Holy Land, where a great many warriors went to rescue Jerusalem from the Mahometans. These were called Crusaders, which means “soldiers of the Cross,” and their wars were called the Crusades.