to his father. Normandy had been pledged to him
by his brother Robert in exchange for a sum which enabled the Duke to
march in the first Crusade for the delivery of the Holy Land, and a
rebellion at Le Mans was subdued by the fierce energy with which William
flung himself at the news of it into the first boat he found, and crossed
the Channel in face of a storm. "Kings never drown," he replied
contemptuously to the remonstrances of his followers. Homage was again
wrested from Malcolm by a march to the Firth of Forth, and the subsequent
death of that king threw Scotland into a disorder which enabled an army
under Eadgar AEtheling to establish Eadgar, the son of Margaret, as an
English feudatory on the throne. In Wales William was less triumphant,
and the terrible losses inflicted on the heavy Norman cavalry in the
fastnesses of Snowdon forced him to fall back on the slower but wiser
policy of the Conqueror. But triumph and defeat alike ended in a strange
and tragical close. In 1100 the Red King was found dead by peasants in a
glade of the New Forest, with the arrow either of a hunter or an assassin
in his breast.

[Sidenote: Henry the First]

Robert was at this moment on his return from the Holy Land, where his
bravery had redeemed much of his earlier ill-fame, and the English crown
was seized by his younger brother Henry in spite of the opposition of the
baronage, who clung to the Duke of Normandy and the union of their
estates on both sides the Channel under a single ruler. Their attitude
threw Henry, as it had thrown Rufus, on the support of the English, and
the two great measures which followed his coronation, his grant of a
charter, and his marriage with Matilda, mark the new relation which this
support brought about between the people and their king. Henry's Charter
is important, not merely as a direct precedent for the Great Charter of
John, but as the first limitation on the despotism established by the
Conqueror and carried to such a height by his son. The "evil customs" by
which the Red King had enslaved and plundered the Church were explicitly
renounced in it, the unlimited demands made by both the Conqueror and his
son on the baronage exchanged for customary fees, while the rights of the
people itself, though recognized more vaguely, were not forgotten. The
barons were held to do justice to their undertenants and to renounce
tyrannical exactions from them, the king promising to restore order and
the "law of