Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/88

78 the two rival claimants of the Crown, and in the growth of what is called the Feudal System (which made the peasants the born vassals and mere slaves of the Barons), every noble had his strong Castle, where he reigned the cruel king of all the neighboring people. Accordingly he perpetrated whatever cruelties he chose. And never were worse cruelties committed upon earth, than in wretched England in those nineteen years.

The writers who were living then, describe them fearfully. They say that the castles were filled with devils, rather than with men; that the peasants, men and women, were put into dungeons for their gold and silver, were tortured with fire and smoke, were hung up by the thumbs, were hung up by the heels with great weights to their heads, were torn with jagged irons, killed with hunger, broken to death in narrow chests filled with sharp-pointed stones, murdered in countless fiendish ways. In England there was no corn, no meat, no cheese, no butter, there was no tilled lands, no harvests. Ashes of burnt towns and dreary wastes, were all that the traveller, fearful of the robbers who prowled abroad at all hours, would see in a long day's journey; and from sunrise until night, he would not come upon a home.

The clergy sometimes suffered, and heavily too, from pillage, but many of them had castles of their own, and fought in helmet and armor like the barons, and drew lots with other fighting men for their share of booty. The Pope (or Bishop of Rome) on King Stephen's resisting his ambition, laid England under an Interdict at one period of this reign; which means that he allowed no service to be performed in the churches, no couples to be married, no bells to be rung, no dead bodies to be buried. Any man having the power to Refuse these things, no matter whether he were called a Pope or a Poulterer, would, of course, have the power of afflicting numbers of innocent people. That nothing might be wanting to the miseries of King Stephen's time, the Pope threw in this contribution to the public store—not very like the widow's contribution, as I think, when Our Saviour sat in Jerusalem over against the Treasury, "and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing."