At last King William died. He received a hurt from his horse being startled at the flames of a small town in France, which his soldiers had set on fire, and was carried to the Abbey of St. Gervase, near Rouen, where he died. He was Duke of Normandy and afterwards King of England, and is sometimes called William the Conqueror, because he conquered English Harold at the battle of Hastings. He was very cruel and very passionate; he took money and land from every one who offended him; and, as I have told you, vexed the English, and indeed all the poor, very much. And this is being a tyrant, rather than a king. He had a very good wife, whose name was Matilda, but his sons were more like him than like their mother; however, you shall read about the two youngest of them, who came to be kings of England. CHAPTER XV. WILLIAM II.—1087 to 1100. How William the Second and Robert of Normandy besieged their brother Henry in his castle; how William was killed in the New Forest, and how London Bridge and Westminster Hall were built in his reign. As soon as William the Conqueror’s death was known in England, his second son, William, who was called Rufus, which means the Red, persuaded the noblemen in England to make him king, instead of his elder brother, Robert. I dare say the noblemen were soon sorry they did so; for although none of William the Conqueror’s sons were very good, this William Rufus was the worst of all. Robert became Duke of Normandy, but his brother William gave him a great deal of money, to let him govern the dukedom, while he went to fight in the Holy Land, where a great many warriors went to rescue Jerusalem from the Mahometans. These were called _Crusaders_, which means “soldiers of the Cross,” and their wars were called the Crusades. King William Rufus then ruled over Normandy and England too, and behaved as a much worse tyrant than his father. I must tell you a story about William and his two brothers, Robert and Henry. Robert, the eldest, as I told you, became Duke of Normandy, when William made himself King of England, but they neither of them thought of giving anything to Henry; so he got a good many soldiers together, and went to live in a castle on the top of a high rock, called St. Michael’s Mount, close to the sea-shore of Normandy, and he and his soldiers used to come out and plunder the fields of both Robert and William, whenever they had an opportunity. This was wrong in Henry in every way, but chiefly because he robbed and frightened people who had never done him any harm, and had nothing to do with the unkindness of his brothers.