defiance of a rule intolerable for its justice and its severity.  England was no less ready for rebellion.  The popular imagination was still moved by the horror of the archbishop’s murder.  The generation that remembered the miseries of the former anarchy was now passing away, and to some of the feudal lords order doubtless seemed the greater ill.  The new king too had lavished promises and threats to win the English nobles to his side.  “There were few barons in England who were not wavering in their allegiance to the king, and ready to desert him at any time.”  The more reckless eagerly joined the rebellion; the more prudent took refuge in France, that they might watch how events would go; there was a timid and unstable party who held outwardly to the king in vigilant uncertainty, haunted by fears that they should be swept away by the possible victory of his son.  Such descendants of the Normans of the Conquest as had survived the rebellions and confiscations of a hundred years were eager for revenge.  The Earl of Leicester and his wife were heirs of three great families, whose power had been overthrown by the policy of the Conqueror and his sons.  William of Aumale was descended from the Count who had claimed the throne in the Conqueror’s days, and bitterly remembered the time before Henry’s accession, when he had reigned almost as king in Northern England.  Hugh of Puiset, Bishop of Durham, whose diocese stretched across Northumberland, and who ruled as Earl Palatine of the marchland between England and Scotland; the Earl of Huntingdon, brother of the Scot king; Roger Mowbray, lord of the castles of Thirsk and Malessart north of York, and of a strong castle in the Isle of Axholm; Earl Ferrers, master of fortresses in Derby and Stafford; Hugh, Earl of Chester and Lord of Bayeux and Avranches, joined the rebellion.  So did the old Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, who had already fought and schemed against Henry in vain twenty years before.  The Earls of Clare and Gloucester on the Welsh border were of very doubtful loyalty.  Half of England was in revolt, and north of a line drawn from Huntingdon to Chester the king only held a few castles—­York, Richmond, Carlisle, Newcastle, and some fortresses of Northumberland.  The land beyond Sherwood and the Trent, shut off by an almost continuous barrier of marsh and forest from the south, was still far behind the rest of England in civilization.  The new industrial activity of Yorkshire was not yet forty years old; in a great part of the North money-rents had scarcely crept in, and the serfs were still toiling on under the burden of labour-dues which had been found intolerable elsewhere.  The fines, the taxes, the attempt to bring its people under a more advanced system of government must have pressed very hardly on this great district which was not yet ready for it; and to the fierce anger of the barons, and the ready hostility of the monasteries, was perhaps added the exasperation of freeholder and serf.