nothing; and one hundred and forty-five were occupied by Frenchmen, who were relieved from the tax.
But while poverty and oppressive taxation ground down the masses of the people, the nobles abandoned themselves to the excesses of gluttony, drunkenness, and promiscuous concubinage, frequently not scrupling to consign the objects of their lust, and even their own offspring, to the miseries of slavery, for paltry sums of money to be squandered in wretched folly. Learning was almost at as low an ebb as it had been at the commencement of the reign of Alfred; while the middle classes, with some, though few, exceptions, were, in many respects, no better than the nobles, and trade and commerce languished and declined. Such was the state of things in England when the Norman conqueror landed on its shores.[1]
- ↑ The above particulars are derived from the records of Domesday, which were, however, never completed for several of the northern counties, possibly owing to the great northern up-rising against William the Conqueror. It is also remarkable that there are no notices of London and Winchester in the Conqueror's Domesday. (See Spelman's Gloss, s. v. Domesday, and Ayloffe's Calendar, p. xviii.) For Winchester, there was a separate register known as the "Winchester Book." A portion of the original survey, with the title of "Inquisitio Eliensis" (from which that in Domesday has been reduced) has been recently discovered in the British Museum, and will shortly be published, under the direction of the Royal Society of Literature, by Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton, Librarian to the Society, and late of the Dep. of MSS., British Museum.
