but the general oppression touches them most.
Rufus and the English. race, rank, or order, a time when the mercenary soldier, of whatever race, did what he thought good, and when all other men had to put up with what he thought good. In such a state of things the burthen of oppression would undoubtedly fall by far the most heavily upon the native English; they would be the class most open to suffering and least able to obtain redress. The broken promises of the King had been specially made to them, and they would feel specially aggrieved and disheartened at his breach of them. Still the good government which Rufus promised, but which he did not give, was a good government which would have profited all the King's men, French and English, and the lack of it pressed, in its measure, on all the King's men, French and English. There is at least nothing to show that, during the reign of Rufus, Englishmen, as Englishmen, were formally and purposely picked out as victims. We must further remember that no legal barrier parted the two races, and that the legal innovations of the reign of Rufus, as mainly affecting the King's military tenants, bore most hardly on a class which was more largely Norman than English. On the other hand, it is certain that native Englishmen did sometimes, if rarely, rise to high places, both ecclesiastical and temporal, in the days of Rufus. Of the many stories current about this king, not above one or two throw any light on his relations to the native English class of his subjects. The one saying of his that bears on the subject savours of good-humoured banter rather than of dislike or even contempt.[1] On the whole, dark as is the picture given us of the reign of Rufus, we cannot look on it as having
- ↑ I refer to the passage which I have already quoted in N. C. vol. v. p. 830, where William Rufus, just before his death (Ord. Vit. 782 B), mocks at the English regard for omens; "Num prosequi me ritum autumat Anglorum, qui pro sternutatione et somnio vetularum dimittunt iter suum seu negotium?"
