Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/536

 *

partisans is set down simply as one among the many ways in which Normandy was torn in pieces by her own children. An English writer meanwhile, on whose main subject the Norman campaigns of Rufus had but a very indirect bearing, speaks casually of this expedition as an undertaking on which a vast deal of money was spent, but by which very little was gained.

It is indeed to be borne in mind, as supplying at least a partial explanation of the way in which the second Norman expedition comes to an end without any end, that things in England were, just as they had been three years and a half before, in a state which urgently called for the presence of the King within his kingdom. We know not whether it at all moved him that the heavy taxation which had been laid on his kingdom for the cost of his warfare had brought the land to the lowest pitch of wretchedness. Men, we are told, had ceased to till the ground; hunger followed; there were hardly left any who could tend the dying or bury the dead. These things might not have greatly stirred the heart of the Red King; but he may, like other tyrants, have felt that there was a bound beyond which oppression could not be safely carried. And there were political and military reasons which called him back. He could not afford to jeopard his undisputed possession of England for the sake of a few more castles in Normandy. He