[Sidenote:  A.D. 1107.]

[Sidenote:  A.D. 1108.]

The success of this battle put Henry in possession of Normandy, which he held ever after with very little disturbance.  He fortified his new acquisition by demolishing the castles of those turbulent barons who had wasted and afterwards enslaved their country by their dissensions.  Order and justice took place, until everything was reduced to obedience; then a severe and regular oppression succeeded the former disorderly tyranny.  In England things took the same course.  The king no longer doubted his fortune, and therefore no longer respected his promises or his charter.  The forests, the savage passion of the Norman princes, for which both the prince and people paid so dearly, were maintained, increased, and guarded with laws more rigorous than before.  Taxes were largely and arbitrarily assessed.  But all this tyranny did not weaken, though it vexed the nation, because the great men were kept in proper subjection, and justice was steadily administered.

The politics of this remarkable reign consisted of three branches:  to redress the gross abuses which prevailed in the civil government and the revenue, to humble the great barons, and keep the aspiring spirit of the clergy within proper bounds.  The introduction of a new law with a new people at the Conquest had unsettled everything:  for whilst some adhered to the Conqueror’s regulations, and others contended for those of St. Edward, neither of them were well executed or properly obeyed.  The king, therefore, with the assistance of his justiciaries, compiled a new body of laws, in order to find a temper between both.  The coin had been miserably debased, but it was restored by the king’s vigilance, and preserved by punishments, cruel, but terrifying in their example.  There was a savageness in all the judicial proceedings of those days, that gave even justice itself the complexion of tyranny:  for whilst a number of men were seen in all parts of the kingdom, some castrated, some without hands, others with their feet cut off, and in various ways cruelly mangled, the view of a perpetual punishment blotted out the memory of the transient crime, and government was the more odious, which, out of a cruel and mistaken mercy, to avoid punishing with death, devised torments far more terrible than death itself.

But nothing called for redress more than the disorders in the king’s own household.  It was considered as an incident annexed to their tenure, that the socage vassals of the crown, and so of all the subordinate barons, should receive their lord and all his followers, and supply them in their progresses and journeys, which custom continued for some ages after in Ireland, under the name of coshering.  But this indefinite and ill-contrived charge on the tenant was easily perverted to an instrument of much oppression by the disorders of a rude and licentious court; insomuch that the tenants, in fear for their substance, for