Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/529

 Longueville on the Scie, with streams and forests between them and Eu. Longueville was the last stage of their march. Thither Rufus sent those who knew how to bring his special arguments to bear on the mind of Philip. The King again went back to France, and the confederate army was broken up.

There is something very singular in the way in which this second Norman war of William Rufus is dealt with by those who wrote at or near the time. Some make no mention of it at all; others speak of it only casually; our own Chronicler, who gives the fullest account of all, does not carry it on to any intelligible issue of success or of failure. In his pages, and in those of some others, the war drops out of notice, without coming to any real end of any kind. The monk of Saint Evroul, so lavish in local Norman details, seems to have had his head too full of the local strifes among the Norman nobles to tell us anything of a warfare which in our eyes comes so much nearer to the likeness of a national struggle. It must always be remembered that the local wars which tore every district of Normandy in pieces did not stop in the least because two hostile kings were encamped on Norman soil. There cannot be a more speaking comment, at once on the difference between Robert and either of his brothers and on the essential difference