But this exploit only exposed him to further perils. Normans were in possession of every castle around; his cousins, the young Earls Edwin find Morkar, had submitted to the Conqueror; Edwin was betrothed to Agatha, William’s daughter; and their sister Lucy was married to an Angevin named Ivo Taillebois bringing him a portion of their lands, in right of which he called himself Viscount of Spalding. Their submission had availed them little; they, as well as Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon (son of Siward, and husband of the Conqueror’s niece, Judith), were feeling that a hand of iron was over them, and regretting every day that he had not made common cause against the enemy before he had fully established his power. Selfishness, jealousy, and wavering, had overthrown and ruined the Saxons. Each had sought to secure his own lands and life, careless of his neighbors. No one had the spirit of Frithric, Abbot of St. Alban’s, who blocked up the Conqueror’s march with trunks of trees, and when asked by William why he had injured his woods for the sake of making an unavailing resistance, replied, “I did my duty. If every one had done as much, you would not be here.” According to their own tradition, the men of Kent, coming forward, each carrying a branch of a tree, so that they advanced unperceived, “a moving wood,” so encumbered William’s passage that he could not proceed till he had taken an oath to respect their privileges. London, too, preserved its rights, owing to the management of a burgess, called Ansgard, who conducted the treaty with the Normans and would not admit them into the city till its liberties were secured. William himself was anxious to be regarded not as a conqueror, but as reigning by inheritence from the Confessor. For this cause, when Matilda was crowned, he caused a Norman baron, Marmion of Fontenaye, to ride into the midst of Westminster Hall, and, throwing down his gauntlet, defy any man to single combat who denied the rights of William and Matilda. He himself took the old coronation oath drawn up by St. Dunstan, and pledged himself to execute justice according to the old laws of Alfred and Edward. But William, whatever might be his own good intentions, was pressed by circumstances. He had lured his Normans across the channel with hopes of rich plunder in England, and knight and squire, man-at-arms and archer, were eager for their reward. Norman, Breton, Angevin, clamored for possession: families of peasants crossed the sea, expecting, in right of their French tongue, to be gentry at once, and lords of the churl Saxons; while the Saxons, fully conscious of their own nobility, and possessors of the soil for five hundred years, derided them in such rhymes as these: “William de Coningsby Came out of Brittany With his wife Tiffany, And his maid Manfas, And his dog Hardigras.”