Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/396

 sort ranked among the disinherited, was of all ministers of the royal will the most eager to draw the heritage of every man, without respect to birth or order, into the hands of the master whom he served too faithfully.

But we shall altogether misunderstand both Flambard and his master, if we take either of them for vulgar spoilers, living as it were from hand to mouth, and casually grasping any sources of gain which chanced to be thrown in their way. Whatever Flambard did he did according to rule and system; nay more, he did it according to the severest rules of logic. Amidst the vague declamations which set him before us as the general robber of all men, we light on particular facts and phrases which give us the clue to the real nature of his doings. It is worth notice that, in more than one picture, the rich are enlarged on as the special victims of his extortions; in one the Ætheling Henry himself is spoken of as having suffered deeply at his hands. We may guess that this has some special reference to the way in which Henry was defrauded of the lands of his mother, a business in which Flambard is likely enough to have had a share. These references to the wrongs done to the rich have their significance; they point to a cunningly devised system of Flambard's, by which, the greater a man's estate was, the more surely was he marked for extortion. The legislation of Flambard, if we can call that legislation which seems never to have been set down in any formal statute, was not at all of the kind which catches the small flies and lets the large ones get through. As we have seen in some other cases, a seemingly casual expression of our native