There was that bride-ale
To many men's bale.
The two earls plotted a rising against William and the revivals of the old independent earldoms. They took arms and were beaten. Ralph fled the country, and Roger was condemned to perpetual imprisonment. His followers were blinded or had their feet cut off. It was the Norman custom not to put criminals to death. To this rule, however, William made one exception. Waltheof, the last earl of purely English race, had been present at the fatal bride-ale, but though he had listened to the plottings of the conspirators, he had revealed all that he knew to William. His wife, Judith, a niece of the Conqueror, accused him of actual treason, and he was beheaded at Winchester. By the English he was regarded as a martyr, and it was probably his popularity amongst them which made William resolve upon his death.
11. The New Forest.—Only once did William cause misery amongst his subjects for the sake of his own enjoyment. Many kings before him had taken pleasure in hunting, but William was the first who claimed the right of hunting over large tracts of country exclusively for himself. He made, as the chronicler says, 'mickle deer-frith'—a tract, that is to say, in which the deer might have peace—'and laid laws therewith that he who slew hart or hind that man should blind him.... In sooth he loved the high deer as though he were their father.' He forbade, in short, all men, except those to whom he gave permission, to hunt within the limits of the royal forests. In the south-west of Hampshire, near his favourite abode at Winchester, he enlarged the New Forest. The soil is poor, and it can never have been covered by cultivated fields, but here and there, by the sides of streams, there were scattered hamlets, and these were destroyed and the dwellers in them driven off by William's orders, that there might be a 'mickle deer-frith.' We may be sure that there was not nearly as much misery caused by the making of the New Forest as was caused by the harrying of the Vale of York, but popular tradition rightly held in more abhorrence the lesser cruelty for the sake of pleasure than the greater cruelty for the sake of policy. It told how the New Forest was accursed for William's family. In his own lifetime a son and a grandson of his were cut off within it by unknown hands, probably falling before the vengeance of some who had lost home and substance through the creation of the Forest, and in due time another son, who succeeded him on the throne, was to meet with a similar fate.
12. Domesday Book. 1085—1086.—It was to William's credit that his government was a strong one. In William's days life and property and female honour were under the protection of a king who knew how to make himself obeyed. Strong government, however, is always expensive, and William and his officers were always ready with an excuse for getting money. "The king and the headmen loved much and overmuch covetousness on gold and on silver, and they recked not how sinfully it was gotten, if only it came to them.... They reared up unright tolls, and many other unright things they did that are hard to reckon." Other men, in short, must observe the law; William's government was a law to itself. It was, however, a law, and not a mere scramble for money. Though there were no Danish invaders now, William continued to levy the Danegeld, and he had rents and payments due to him in many quarters which had been due to his predecessors. In order to make his exactions more complete and more regular, he resolved to have set down the amount of taxable property in the realm that his full rights might be known, and in 1085, "He sent over all England into ilk shire his men, and let them find out how many hundred hides were in the shire, or what the king himself had of land or cattle in the land, or whilk rights he ought to have.... Eke he let write how mickle of land his archbishops had, and his bishops, and his abbots and his earls, and what or how mickle ilk man had that landholder was in England in land and in cattle, and how mickle fee it was worth. So very narrowly he let speer it out that there was not a single hide nor a yard of land, nor so much as—it is a shame to tell, though he thought it no shame to do—an ox nor a cow nor a swine was left that was not set in his writ." The chronicler who wrote these words was an English monk of Peterborough. Englishmen were shocked by the new regularity of taxation. They could hardly be expected to understand the advantages of a government strong enough through regular taxation to put down the resistance of rebellious earls at home and to defy invasion from abroad. The result of the inquiries of the king's commissioners was embodied in Domesday Book, so called because it was no more possible to appeal from it than from the Last Judgment.
Reduced facsimile of part of Domesday Book.