Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/209

 ilk right fell away, and ilk unright for God and for world uprose."

Thus were the promises with which William Rufus had bought the help of the English people in his day of danger utterly trampled under foot. He had promised them good laws and freedom from unrighteous taxes; he had promised them that they should have again, as in the days of Cnut, the right of every man to slay the beasts of the field for his lawful needs. Instead of all this, the reign of the younger William became, above all other reigns, a reign of unlaw and of ungeld. The savage pleasures of the father, for the sake of which he had laid waste the homes and fields of Hampshire, were sought after by the son with a yet keener zest, and were fenced in by a yet sterner code. In the days of William the Red the man who slew a hart had, what he had not in the days of William the Great, to pay for his crime with his life. The working of this stern law is shown in one of the many stories of William Rufus, a story of which we should like to hear the end a little more clearly. Fifty men were charged with having taken, killed, and eaten the King's deer. We are so generally left to guess at the nationality of the lesser actors in our story that our attention is specially called to the marked way in which we are told that