Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/404

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conquerors of Senlac or their sons. It was a form of oppression which would strike men as specially falling upon the rich. A special meaning is thus given to phrases which might otherwise be thought to be merely those common formulæ which, in speaking of any evil which affects all classes, join rich and poor together. The devices of Flambard were specially aimed at the rich. The great mass of the English people, and that large class of Normans who held their lands, not straight of the king but of some intermediate lord, were touched by them only when the lords who suffered by Flambard's exactions tried to make good their own losses by exactions of the same kind on their own tenants. That they did so is shown by the reforming charter of Henry. When he promises to deal fairly and lawfully by his barons and his other men in the matters of relief and marriage, he demands that his barons shall deal fairly and lawfully by their men in the like cases. But in the first instance it was mainly the rich, mainly the Normans, whom the feudal devices of Flambard touched. And it is not the least strange thing in these times to see a race of warlike and high-spirited nobles, conquerors or sons of conquerors, submit to so galling a yoke, a yoke which must have been all the more galling when we think of the origin and position of the man by whom it was devised. We cannot think that the king's clerks were ever a popular body with any class, high or low, native or foreign. Their position appealed to no sentiment of any kind, military, religious, or national; their rule rather implied the treading under foot of all such sentiments. The military tenants must have looked on them with the dislike which men of the sword, specially in such