years before.” “In that year (1131) there was so great a murrain of cattle as never was in the memory of man.” This carried off neat, swine, and domestic fowls alike. And when the harvest was good the pestilence came. “This year (1112) was a very good year, and very abundant in wood and field, but it was a very sorrowful one through a most destructive pestilence.” Or again, the year 1104, “It is not easy to recount all the miseries the country suffered this year through various and manifold illegalities and imposts which never ceased nor failed, and ever as the King went there was plundering by his followers on his wretched people, and at the same time often burnings and murders.” [Sidenote: Their chief complaints.] [Sidenote: Baronial tyranny.] In these extracts, which might be largely multiplied, the chief causes of the people’s misery are mentioned. Heavy taxes, famines, floods, pestilence, false money, and purveyance. To attempt to rectify such of these as were within the power of man, was one main part of Henry’s duty. To that was added the work of suppressing, by a centralized royal power, the excesses of the feudal barons. What crying necessity there was that they should be suppressed is made plain by the stories related of Robert of Belesme, their chief. He is spoken of as guilty of the most unheard-of barbarities, as having scorned the ransoms of his captives to torture them by newfangled instruments; he found delight in seeing men and women impaled and struggling in the agonies of death. “He was a man,” says William of Malmesbury, “intolerable for the barbarity of his manners, remarkable besides for cruelty;” and, among other instances, he relates how, on account of some trifling fault of its father, he blinded his godchild, who was his hostage, by tearing out the poor little creature’s eyes with “his accursed nails.” [Sidenote: Heavy taxation.] [Sidenote: Henry cures what evils he can.]