Their grievances seem to have been at first founded rather on suspicion than on proof. When the City was taxed, the assessors were the Aldermen; the craftsmen had to pay what they were ordered to pay; no one knew what the Aldermen themselves paid. They were therefore, very naturally, accused of shifting the whole burden of taxation from their own shoulders to those of the craftsmen. But a grievance of suspicion, among a rude and ignorant people, is as dangerous as a grievance founded on fact. Another grievance was the poll tax, in which the poor men paid as much as the rich men. And a standard grievance in every industrial city, and in every age, is the question of wages and hours. Presently the Deliverer arose—who yet was to prove no Deliverer. William, called FitzOsbert, and sometimes William Longbeard, was the grandson of a certain Osbert, one of the Aldermen who, in 1125, had given to the Priory of the Holy Trinity, with the King’s permission, the lands belonging to the Cnihten Guild. He was, therefore, by birth one of the governing class, whose abuses he attacked. He was also, it would seem from the first episode in his life which has come down to us, of a nature easily moved and imaginative, and, like his grandfather, disposed to piety. Such a mind belongs to the man who instinctively hates injustice and oppression. Most of the chroniclers who tell the story belong to the other side, and, therefore, charge him with everything that they dare: the crimes, however, are so vague, such as obscurity of origin, meanness of appearance, ingratitude to a brother, that they mean nothing and may be neglected. I prefer to take the evidence of the historian, Roger de Hoveden, who says as follows:— “The rich men, sparing their own purses, wanted the poor to pay everything. But a certain lawyer, William FitzOsbert by name, or Long-beard, becoming sensible of this, being inflamed by zeal for justice and equity, became the champion of the poor, it being his wish that every person, both rich as well as poor, should give according to his property and means for all the necessities of the State; and, going across the sea to the King, he demanded his protection for himself and the people.” (Roger de Hoveden’s _Annals_, vol. ii.)