Page:A School History of England (1911).djvu/67

 all. During these years of peace many Norman barons got into the south of Scotland, were welcomed and were endowed with lands by King David I.

As regards the French business, there was very little real peace between the Duke of Normandy and the French King. And as the former was now King of England also, he generally got the best of it. Until the middle of the twelfth century, the King of France was very poor and could get very few people to fight for him, whereas Henry I once shipped a lot of sturdy English soldiers across the Channel, and won a great victory at Tenchebray, 1106, over Norman rebels who were being encouraged by the French King. As a rule, however, our Kings fought their battles in France with foreign soldiers hired in Flanders. The English Kings even had some sort of a fleet, for the ‘Cinque Ports’ (Dover, Sandwich, Hythe, Romney and Hastings) were obliged to furnish them a certain number of ships every year. The causes of these quarrels with France are not interesting to us. They were usually about some frontier castle which the French King had grabbed or wanted to grab from the Duke, or the Duke from the King. At one of these quarrels William the Conqueror met his death in 1087. A terrible king and a terrible man he had been; but he had kept peace, and the fiercest baron had trembled before him. His one pleasure was hunting, and he was so greedy of it, that he began to make a series of cruel laws against poachers which later kings kept up till 1217. It was death to kill a stag in the royal forests.

His eldest son, Robert, was a weak, good-natured fellow, who had once rebelled against his father, and was the darling of the turbulent barons. So William had