Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/397

 *



Chronicler is the best record of a matter of no small constitutional importance. The Red King "would be ilk man's heir, ordered and lewd." In those words lay the whole root of the matter. The great work of the administration of Flambard, the great work of the reign of Rufus, was to put in order a system of rules by which the King might be the heir of every man. Those few words, which might seem to have dropped from the Chronicler in a moment of embittered sarcasm, do indeed set forth the formal beginning of a series of burthens and exactions under which Englishmen, and preeminently the rich and noble among Englishmen, groaned for not much less than six hundred years after Flambard's days.

In short the "unrighteousness" ordained by William Rufus and Randolf Flambard are no other than those feudal tenures and feudal burthens which even the Parliament which elected Charles the Second, in the midst of its self-abasement and betrayal of its own ancient rights, declared to have been "much more burthensome, grievous, and prejudicial to the kingdom than they have been beneficial to the king." Assuredly they were as burthensome, grievous, and prejudicial to the kingdom in the eleventh century as they were in the seventeenth; but assuredly they were found in the eleventh century to be highly beneficial to the King, or they would not have been ordained by Rufus and Flambard. We have reached the age of chivalry; and tenure in chivalry,