Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/405

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an age, are apt to look on the rule of men of the pen. In the eyes of strict churchmen they must have passed for ungodly scorners of the decencies of their order. To the mass of the people they must have seemed foreign extortioners, and nothing more. They represented the power of the king, and nothing else. In some states of things the power of the king, even of a despotic king, may be welcomed as the representative of law against force. But under Rufus the power of the king was before all things the representative of unlaw. Yet though all murmured, all submitted. The son of the poor priest of the Bessin, clothed with a power purely official, lorded it over all classes and orders. Earls, prelates, and people, were alike held down by the guide and minister of the royal will.

One cause of this general submission is doubtless to be found in the immediate circumstances of the time. The alliance of the King and the English people had for the moment broken the power of the Norman nobles. The ecclesiastical estate was left without a head by the death of Lanfranc. The popular estate was left without a head, as soon as the King turned away from the people who had given him his crown, and broke all the promises that he had made to them. There was no power of combination; the great days when nobles, clergy, and commons, could join together against the king, as three orders in one nation, were yet far distant. Each class had to bear its own grievances as it could; no class could get any help from any other class; and the King's picked mercenaries, kept at the expense of all classes, were stronger than any one class by itself. Yet we cannot doubt that even the rule of Rufus and Flambard did something towards the great work of founding national unity. All the inhabitants of the land, if they had nothing else in common, had common grievances and a common oppressor.