Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/75

 of blood. It is taken for granted that the death of the great king, at whose death we are told that peaceable men wept and that robbers and fiends rejoiced, was something from which Odo and men like Odo might expect to gain. But nothing would be gained, if the rod of the elder William were to pass into the hands of the younger. The little finger of the son would be found to be thicker than the loins of the father. Their release from the rule of the King who was gone would profit them nothing, if they remained subjects of one who was likely to slay where his father had merely put in bonds. In this last contrast, though we may doubt whether there could have been any ground for drawing it so early in the reign of Rufus, we see that the men of the time were struck by the difference between the King whose laws forbade the judicial taking of human life and the King under whom the hangman began his work again. To pleadings like these we are told that the great mass of the Norman nobility in England hearkened; a small number only remained faithful to the King to whom they had so lately sworn their oaths. Thus, as the national Chronicler puts it, "the unrede was read."

As the chief devisers of the unrede we have the names of two bishops besides Odo. One name we do not wonder to find along with his. Geoffrey Bishop of Coutances was a prelate of Odo's own stamp, one of; Roberto regnum competere, qui sit et remissioris animi, et juveniles stultitias multis jam laboribus decoxerit; hunc delicate nutritum, animi ferocia (quam vultus ipse demonstret), prætumidum, omnia contra fas et jus ausurum; brevi futurum ut honores jamdudum plurimis sudoribus partos amittant; nihil actum morte patris, si quos ille vinxerit iste trucidet." (Again the ending of a hexameter.) A good deal of this seems to come from later experience of Rufus.]