followed, and the king who rushed to the spot, had much difficulty in quelling it. That very night Robert fled with his companions to Rouen, fully determined to raise the standard of revolt. He failed in his first attempt, which was to take the castle of Rouen; and soon after, some of his warmest partisans were surprised and made prisoners by the king's officers. The prince escaped across the frontiers of Normandy into the district of Le Perche, where Hugh, nephew of Aubert le Ribaud, welcomed him, and sheltered him in his castles of Sorel and Reymalard. By the mediation of his mother, who seems to have been fondly attached to him, Robert was reconciled to his father; but the reconciliation did not last long, for the prince was as impatient for authority as ever; and the young counsellors who surrounded him found it unseemly and altogether abominable that he should be left so poor, through the avarice of his father, as not to have a shilling to give his faithful friends who followed his fortunes. Thus excited, Robert went to his father, and again demanded possession of Normandy; but the king again refused him, exhorting him at the same time to change his associates for serious old men like the royal counsellor and prime minister, Archbishop Lanfranc "Sire," said Robert, bluntly, "I came here to claim my right, and not to listen to sermons-I heard plenty of them, and tedious ones too, when I was learning my grammar;" and then he added, that he insisted on a positive answer to his demand of the duchy. The king wrathfully replied that he would never give up Normandy, his native land, nor share with another any part of England, which he had won with his own toil and peril. Well, then," said Robert, I will go and bear arms among strangers, and perhaps I shall obtain from them what is refused to me by my father." He set out accordingly, and wandered through Flanders, Lorraine, Gascony, and other lands, visiting dukes, counts, and rich burgesses, relating his grievances, and asking assistance; but all the money he got on these eleemosynary circuits he dissipated among minstrels and jugglers, parasites and prosti

tutes, and was thus obliged to go again a begging, or borrow money at an enormous interest. Queen Matilda, whose maternal tenderness was not estranged by the follies and vices of her son, contrived to remit him several sums when he was in great distress. William discovered this, and sternly forbade it for the future. But her heart still yearning for the prodigal, the queen made further remittances, and her secret was again betrayed. The king then reproached her in bitter terms for distributing among his enemies the treasures he gave her to guard for himself, and ordered the arrest of Samson, her messenger, who had carried the money, and whose eyes he vowed to tear out as a proper punishment. Samson, who was a Breton, took to flight, and became a monk "for the salvation both of body and soul."

After leading a vagabond life for some time, Robert repaired to the French court; and king Philip, still finding in him the instrument he wanted, openly espoused his cause, and established him in the castle of Gerberoy, on the very confines of Normandy, where he supported himself by plundering the neighbouring country, and whence he corresponded with the disaffected in the duchy. Knights and troops of adventurers on horseback flocked to share the plunder and the pay he now had to offer them: in the number were as many Norman as French subjects, and not a few of king William's own household. Burning with rage, the king crossed the Channel with a formidable English army, and came in person to direct the siege of the strong castle of Gerberoy, where he lost many men in fruitless operations, and from sorties made by the garrison. With all his faults, Robert had many good and generous qualities, which singularly endeared him to his friends when living, and which, along with his cruel misfortunes, caused him to be mourned when dead. Ambition, passion, and evil counsel had lulled and stupefied, but had not extirpated his natural feelings. One day, in a sally from his castle, he chanced to engage in single combat with a stalwart warrior clad in mail, and concealed, like himself, with the visor of his helm. Both

were valiant and well skilled in the use of their weapons, but after a fierce combat, Robert wounded and unhorsed his antagonist. In the voice of the fallen warrior, who shouted for assistance, the prince, who was about to follow up his advantage with a death-stroke, recognized his father, and, instantly dismounting, fell on his knees, craved forgiveness with tears, and helping him to his saddle, saw him safely out of the melee which now thickened. The men who were coming up to the king's assistance, and bringing a second horse for him to mount, were nearly all killed. William rode away to his camp on Robert's horse, smarting with his wound, and still cursing his son who had so seasonably mounted him. He relinquished the siege of Gerberoy in despair, and went to Rouen, where, as soon as his temper permitted, his wife and bishops, with many of the Norman nobles, laboured to reconcile him again to Robert. For a long time the iron-hearted king was deaf to their entreaties, or only irritated by them. "Why," cried he, "do you solicit me in favour of a traitor who has seduced my men,my very pupils in war, whom I fed with my own bread, and invested with the knightly arms they wear?" At last he yielded, and Robert having again knelt and wept before him, received his father's pardon, and accompanied him to England. But even now the reconciliation on the part of the unforgiving king was a mere matter of policy, and Robert, finding no symptoms of returning affection, and fearing for his life or liberty, soon fled for the third time, and never saw his father's face again. His departure was followed by another paternal malediction, which was never revoked.

ONQUEROR of England, William the First might have indulged his passion for the chase in the

many parks and forests which Anglo-Saxon monarchs had reserved for the purpose, but he preferred rather to have a vast hunting-ground for his "superfluous insatiate pleasure" in the immediate neighbourhood of Winchester, his favourite place of residence. The wide expanse that was thus doomed to inevitable desolation was called Ytene or Ytchtene; it comprised numerous villages and homesteads, churches and ancestral halls, where Saxon families of rank resided, and where an industrious population followed the daily routine of pasturage and husbandry. A large proportion had been conse

quently brought into cultivation; yet sufficient still remained to afford a harbour for numerous wild animals. This part comprised many sylvan spots of great beauty, with tracts of common land, covered with the golden blossomed gorse, and tufts of ferns, or else with short herbage, intermingled with wild thyme. Noble groups of forest trees were seen at intervals, with clear running streams, and masses of huge stones which projected from among the grass. The sun rose on the morning of the fatal day in cloudless beauty, and fresh breezes tempered the heat, which, at harvest time, is often great; the people were already in the fields, and the creaking of heavy-laden wagons was heard at intervals, with the sweeping sound of the rapid sickle. In a moment the scene was changed. Bands of Norman soldiers rushed in and drove all before them. They trod down the standing corn, and commanded the terrified inhabitants of hall and hut, to depart in haste. More than one hundred manors, villages, and hamlets were depopulated, even the churches were thrown down-those venerated places, where the voice of prayer and thanksgiving had been heard for generations. He who passed the next day over the wide waste, saw only ruins black with smoke, trampled fields, and dismantled churches. Here and there broken implements of husbandry met the view, and beside them, not unfrequently, the corpse of him who had dared to resist the harsh mandate of the conqueror. Females, too, had fallen to the earth in their terror and distress, and young children were in their deathsleep, among the tufts of flowers where they had sported the day before. Many stately buildings were pulled down at once; others, having their roofs thrown open, were left to be destroyed by the weather, and hence it not seldom happened that a stranger, in passing through a meadow into one of those shady coverts, which still varied the aspect of the country, forgetting, in the freshness and loveliness of all around him, the terrible undoings of previous days, might see, through the undulating branches of the trees, the walls or roofs of houses, which looked as if they had escaped the