Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/212

198 to submit his naked flesh to the discipline of the rods."



The king knelt upon the stone of the tomb, and, stripping off part of his clothes, exposed his back to the scourge. Each of the bishops then took one of the whips with several lashes, used in the monasteries for penance, and each, in turn, struck the king several times on the shoulders, saying, "As Christ was scourged for our sins, so be thou for thine own." The rest of the monks present, to the number of about eighty, then took the whips, and it is said that many of these, who were of Saxon descent, gave their blows with vigour, so that the penance endured by the king was not merely nominal. The scourging did not end the acts of humiliation. Henry remained a day and a night prostrate before the tomb, during which time he took no food, and did not quit the place. The fatigue which he thus underwent brought on a fever, which continued him during several days to his chamber. The display of repentance, whether real or assumed, produced a reaction in the king's favour among the people, and he at once recovered the popularity he had lost. It happened that on the day when Henry was thus humbling himself before the tomb of Becket, one of his most powerful enemies had been taken prisoner. William the Lion, of Scotland, had made a hostile incursion into the lands of the English; and on the 12th of July, when he was amusing himself by tilting in a meadow with some of his nobles, he was surprised by Ranulph de Glanville, and captured, together with those who were with him. The English people,