Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/148

 The terms were agreed to by the Bishop, and were sworn to, as far as the surrender of the castle was concerned, by seven of the Bishop's men, seemingly the same seven of whom we have heard before and of whom we shall hear again. All matters were to be settled in the King's court one way or the other by the coming feast of Saint Michael; but, as this term was plainly too short, the time of meeting was put off by the consent of both sides to an early day in November.

On the appointed day Bishop William of Durham appeared in the King's court at Salisbury. We have not now, as we had two years before, to deal with a gathering of all the land-owners of England in the great plain. The castle which had been reared within the ditches that fence in the waterless hill became the scene of a meeting of the King and the great men of the realm which may take its place alongside of later meetings of the same kind in the castle by the wood at Rockingham and in the castle by the busy streets of Northampton. We have—from the Bishop's side only, it must be remembered—a minute and lifelike account of a two days' debate in the Assembly, a debate in which not a few men with whose names we have been long familiar in our story, in which others whose names and possessions are written in the Great Survey, meet us face to face as living men and utter characteristic speeches in our ears. We are met at the threshold by a well-known form, that of the terrible Sheriff of Worcestershire, Urse of Abetot. Notwithstanding the curse of Ealdred, he flourished and enjoyed court favour, and we now find him the first among the courtiers to meet Bishop William, and to bid him enter the royal presence. That presence the Bishop entered four times*