Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/213

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were the device of a courtier of Rufus, Robert henceforth surnamed the Cornard, and they were further improved by Count Fulk of Anjou, when he wished to hide the swellings on his gouty feet. The long hair and the long-pointed shoes serve as special subjects for declamation among the moral writers of the time. But these unseemly fashions were only the outward signs of the deeper corruption within. The courtiers, the minions, of Rufus, forerunners of the minions of the last Henry of Valois, altogether forsook the law of God and the customs of their fathers. The day they passed in sleep; the night in revellings, dicing, and vain talk. Vices before unknown, the vices of the East, the special sin, as Englishmen then deemed, of the Norman, were rife among them. And deepest of all in guilt was the Red King himself. Into the details of the private life of Rufus it is well not to grope too narrowly. In him England might see on her own soil the habits of the ancient Greek and the modern Turk. His sins were of a kind from which his brother Henry, no model of moral perfection, was deemed to be wholly free, and which he was believed to look upon with loathing.

Sinners, even of the special type of the Red King, have before now been zealous supporters of orthodoxy. If William persecuted Anselm, Constans defended Athanasius. But the foulness of William's life was of a piece with his open mockery of everything which other men in his day held sacred. Whatever else divided Englishman and Norman, they were at least one in religious doctrine