Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/535

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like him a monk, but four days before a mighty earl, Roger of Montgomery, of Arundel, and of Shrewsbury, the youngest brother of the house beyond the Severn bridge of which he at least claimed to be the founder. His vast possessions were divided at his death. Robert of Bellême, already heir of his mother in the borderland, now became heir of his father in Normandy. The earldom of Shrewsbury and Roger's other English estates passed to his second son Hugh, who bears the character of being the only one of the sons of Mabel who was mild and gentle —mild and gentle, we must understand, to Normans, perhaps even to Englishmen, but certainly not to captive Britons. Of Hugh, as well as of Robert of Bellême and Roger of Poitou, as well as of Arnulf of Montgomery, a fourth son of the same fierce stock, we shall hear much as our tale goes on. In England too, perhaps within his sheriffdom of Leicester, died Hugh of Grantmesnil, of whom we have lately heard in the civil wars both of Normandy and of England, and whom his own shire and his neighbours of Northamptonshire had no reason to bless. His body, we need hardly say, found its way across the sea, to lie among his loyal bedesmen at Saint Evroul. These men all left the world in the year with which we are now dealing, and left the hoary Earl of Buckingham to be for eight years longer the representative of an earlier day. The hands which eight and twenty years before had been too feeble to bear the banner of the Apostle were still, it would seem, ready to do whatever was still found for them to do in the service of the Red King. But the warfare of the King and his