Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/246



In other respects also Normandy suddenly changed from what it had been under the great King-duke. William the Great, strict to austerity in his private life, careful in the observance of all religious duties, a zealous supporter of ecclesiastical discipline, had made his duchy into a kind of paradise in ecclesiastical eyes. All this was now swept away. The same flood of foolish and vicious fashions which overspread England overspread Normandy also. There is nothing to convict Robert personally of the special vices of Rufus; but the life of the unmarried Duke was very unlike the life of his father. And vice of the grossest kind, the vices of Rufus himself, stalked forth into broad daylight, unabashed and unpunished. The ecclesiastical power, no longer supported by the secular arm, was too weak to restrain or to chastise. As every form of violence, so every form of licentiousness, had its full swing in the Normandy of Robert Curthose.



But, above all, this time stood out, like all times of anarchy, as a time of building and strengthening of castles. One of the means by which the Conqueror had maintained the peace of the land had been by keeping garrisons of his own in the castles of such of his nobles as were likely to be dangerous. He had followed this wise policy with the castle of Evreux, the stronghold of his kinsman Count William. He had followed it with the crowd of castles which, as the inheritance of his

Normannia querebatur." Of Robert's bounty he goes on to say that he would give any sum for a hawk or a dog; "Hujus autem pietatis sororculam eam fuisse patet largitatem, quæ accipitrem, sive canem argenti summa quantalibet comparabat."]
 * [Footnote: nullis sceleribus frænum, immo omnibus additum calcar ea tempestate