Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/230

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enabled to play it so much more powerfully after his death, were no doubt already at work; but they had as yet not wrought any open change, or done anything specially to impress men's minds. The writers of the time have nothing to record, except natural phænomena, and it must be remembered that natural phænomena, and those mostly of a baleful kind, form a marked feature of the reign of William Rufus. Even he could hardly be charged with directly causing earthquakes, storms, and bad harvests; but, in the ideas of his day, it was natural to look on earthquakes, storms, and bad harvests, either as scourges sent to punish his evil deeds, or else as signs that some more direct vengeance was presently coming upon himself. The ever-living belief of those times in the near connexion between the moral and the physical world must always be borne in mind in reading their history. And in the days of William Rufus there was plenty in both worlds to set men's minds a-thinking. Lanfranc had not been dead three months before the land was visited with a mighty earthquake. The strongest buildings—the massive keeps and minsters lately built or still building—seemed to spring from the ground and sink back again into their places. Then came a lack of the fruits of the earth of all kinds; the harvest was slow in ripening and scanty when it came; men reaped their corn at Martinmas and yet later.