s strangely, not only with her former career,
but with the energy which, when the heavy yoke was taken off her neck,
she displayed as an old woman of nearly seventy during the reign of her
son. Henry, in fact, stood alone among his new people. No debt of
gratitude, no ties of friendship, bound the king to the lords whose aims
he had first learned to know at Wallingford. The great barons who
thronged round him in his court had all been rebels; the younger among
them had never known what order, government, or loyalty meant. The Church
was hesitating and timorous. To the people he was an utter stranger,
unable even to speak their tongue. But from the first Henry took his
place as absolute master and leader. "A strict regard to justice was
apparent in him, and at the very outset he bore the appearance of a
great prince."

The king at once put in force the scheme of reform which had been drawn
up the year before at Wallingford, and of which the provisions have
comedown to us in phrases drawn from the two sources which were most
familiar to the learned and the vulgar of that day,--the Bible, and the
prophecies of Merlin, the seer of King Arthur. The nobles were to give
up all illegal rights and estates which they had usurped. The castles
built by the warring barons were to be destroyed. The king was to bring
back husbandmen to the desolate fields, and to stock pastures and
forests and hillsides with cattle and deer and sheep. The clergy were
henceforth to live in quiet, not vexed by unaccustomed burdens. Sheriffs
were to be restored to the counties, who should do justice without
corruption, nor persecute any for malice; thieves and robbers were to be
hanged; the armed forces were to be disbanded; the knights were to beat
their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; the
hired Flemish soldiers were to turn from the camp to the plough, from
tents to workshops, there to render as servants the obedience they had
once demanded as masters. The work which Stephen had failed to do was
now swiftly accomplished. The Flemish mercenaries vanished "like
phantoms," or "like wax before the fire," and their leader, William of
Ypres, the lord of Kent, turned with weeping to a monastery in his own
land. The feudal lords were forced to give up such castles and lands as
they had wrongfully usurped; and the newly-created earls were deprived
of titles which they had wrung from King or Empress in the civil wars.

The great n