[359] Maine lay directly to the south of Normandy.
[360] This statement is doubtful, though it is true that Lanfranc made a beginning by consecrating a number of bishops in Ireland.
[361] All of the early Norman kings were greedy for money and apt to bear heavily upon the people in their efforts to get it. Englishmen were not accustomed to general taxation and felt the new régime to be a serious burden. There was consequently much complaint, but, as our historian says, William was strong enough to be able to ignore it.
[362] Most of William's harsh measures can be justified on the ground that they were designed to promote the ultimate welfare of his people. This is not true, however, of his elaborate forest laws, which undertook to deprive Englishmen of their accustomed freedom of hunting when and where they pleased. William's love of the chase amounted to a passion and he was not satisfied with merely enacting such stringent measures as that the slayer of a hart or a hind in his forests should be blinded, but also set apart a great stretch of additional country, the so-called New Forest, as his own exclusive hunting grounds.
[363] In other words, it is Duke William's hope that, though not himself willing to be restricted to the life of a monk, he may secure substantially an equivalent reward by patronizing men who are thus willing.
[364] Mâcon, the seat of the diocese in which Cluny was situated, was on the Saône, a short distance to the southeast.
[365] Berno served as abbot of Cluny from 910 until 927.
[366] That the charitable side of the monastery's work was well attended to is indicated by the fact that in a single year, late in the eleventh century, seventeen thousand poor were given assistance by the monks.
[367] The remainder of the charter consists of a series of imprecations of disaster and punishment upon all who at any time and in any way should undertake to interfere with the vested rights just granted. These imprecations were strictly typical of the mediæval spirit-so much so that many of them came to be mere formulæ, employed to give documents due solemnity, but without any especially direful designs on the part of the writer who used them.
[368] Emerton, Mediæval Europe, p. 458.