Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/188

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at all turned back or checked the course of national advance. When mercenary soldiers have the upper hand, they are sure to be chosen rather from strangers of any race than from natives of the land of any race. There is indeed no reason to think that either a native Englishman or a man of Norman descent born in England would, if he were strong, brave, and faithful, be shut out from the Red King's military family. The eye of Rufus must have been keen enough to mark many an act of good service done on the shore of Pevensey or beneath the stronghold of Rochester. But all experience shows that the tendency of such military families is to recruit themselves anywhere rather than among the sons of the soil. And nothing draws the sons of the soil more closely together than the presence of strangers on the soil. In their presence they learn to forget any mutual grievances against one another. In after times Normans and English drew together against Brabançons and Poitevins. We may feel sure that they did so from the beginning, and that the reign of Rufus really had its share in making ready the way for the fusion of the two races, by making both races feel themselves fellow-sufferers in a time of common wrong-doing.

The rebellion and its suppression, the affairs of the Bishop of Durham, and the striking episode by the Orm's Head, fill up the first stirring year of the Red King. But the year of the rebellion is also marked by one or two ecclesiastical events, which throw some light on the state of things in the early days of Rufus, while he still had Lanfranc to his guide. The great ecclesiastical crimes of the Red King in his after days were the bestowal of bishoprics and abbeys for money, and the practice of keeping them vacant for his own profit. Of these two abuses, the former seems to have been the earlier