who had cruelly plundered his poor villains, was complimented by one of his flatterers, who said, “Ah, sir! truly thou dost well. For men ought always to pluck and pillage the churl, who is like the willow--it sprouteth out the better for being often cropped.” The power and wealth of the great Norman baron were immense, and before him, during a great part of the period of which we are now speaking, the law of the land was a mere nominal institution. He was in general proud, very tyrannical, and often barbarously cruel. A type of the feudal baron in his worst point of view is presented to us in the character of the celebrated Robert de Belesme, who succeeded his father Roger de Montgomery in the earldom of Shropshire, and of whom Henry of Huntingdon, who lived in his time, tells us, “He was a very Pluto, Megæra, Cerberus, or anything that you can conceive still more horrible. He preferred the slaughter of his captives to their ransom. He tore out the eyes of his own children, when in sport they hid their faces under his cloak. He impaled persons of both sexes on stakes. To butcher men in the most horrible manner was to him an agreeable feast.” Of a contemporary feudal chieftain in France, the same writer tells us, “When any one, by fraud or force, fell into his hands, the captive might truly say, ‘The pains of hell compassed me round.’ Homicide was his passion and his glory. He imprisoned his own countess, an unheard-of outrage; and, cruel and lewd at once, while he subjected her to fetters and torture by day, to extort money, he forced her to cohabit with him by night, in order to mock her. Each night his brutal followers dragged her from her prison to his bed, each morning they carried her from his chamber back to her prison. Amicably addressing any one who approached him, he would plunge a sword into his side, laughing the while; and for this purpose he carried his sword naked under his cloak more frequently than sheathed. Men feared him, bowed down to him, and worshipped him.” Women of rank are met with in the histories of this period who equalled these barons in violence and cruelty; and the relations between the sexes were marked by little delicacy or courtesy. William the Conqueror beat his wife even before they were married. The aristocratic class in general lived a life of idleness, which would have been insupportable without some scenes of extraordinary excitement, and they not only indulged eagerly in hunting, but they continually sallied forth in parties to plunder. They looked upon the mercantile class especially as objects of hostility; and, as they could seldom overcome them in their towns, they waylaid them on the public roads, deprived them of their goods and money, and carried them to their castles, where they tortured them in order to force them to pay heavy ransoms. The young nobles sometimes joined together to plunder a fair or market. On the other hand, men who could