The terms were agreed to by the Bishop, and were sworn to, as far as the surrender of the castle was concerned, by seven of the Bishop's men, seemingly the same seven of whom we have heard before and of whom we shall hear again. All matters were to be settled in the King's court one way or the other by the coming feast of Saint Michael; but, as this term was plainly too short, the time of meeting was put off by the consent of both sides to an early day in November.
The Meeting at Salisbury. November 2, 1088.
Urse of Abetot.
On the appointed day Bishop William of Durham
appeared in the King's court at Salisbury. We have
not now, as we had two years before, to deal with a
gathering of all the land-owners of England in the great
plain. The castle which had been reared within the
ditches that fence in the waterless hill became the
scene of a meeting of the King and the great men of
the realm which may take its place alongside of later
meetings of the same kind in the castle by the wood
at Rockingham and in the castle by the busy streets
of Northampton. We have—from the Bishop's side only,
it must be remembered—a minute and lifelike account
of a two days' debate in the Assembly, a debate in which
not a few men with whose names we have been long
familiar in our story, in which others whose names and
possessions are written in the Great Survey, meet us
face to face as living men and utter characteristic
speeches in our ears. We are met at the threshold by
a well-known form, that of the terrible Sheriff of
Worcestershire, Urse of Abetot. Notwithstanding the
curse of Ealdred, he flourished and enjoyed court favour,
and we now find him the first among the courtiers to
meet Bishop William, and to bid him enter the royal
presence.[1] That presence the Bishop entered four times*
- ↑ Mon. Angl. i. 246. "In quarto nonas Novembris . . . venit episcopus Salisbiriam, quem cum Ursus de Habetot unus ex servientibus regis ad regem
