England did not listen at first, and William Rufus chuckled over his good bargain, and taxed his unwilling subjects more heavily than ever to get the money to pay his crusader brother. England would listen by and by, but in this first crusade she took [Pg352] little part, while the Normans and Frenchmen and all their neighbors spent three years of fearful suffering and hardship in the strange countries of the East; at last they won the Holy Sepulchre. The Turks were still fighting to win it back again; they were dangerous enemies, and the Christian host was dwindling fast. The cry was sent again through Europe for more soldiers of the Holy Cross. Here we come face to face again with the old viking spirit: under all the fast-increasing luxury that threatened to sap and dull the life of Normandy, the love of adventure and fierce energy of character were only sleeping. The most sentimental and pleasure loving of Robert's knights could lightly throw off his ribbons and gay trappings, and buckle on his armor when the summons came. Quickly they marched and fiercely they fought in the holy wars, and so it came about that the Norman banners were planted at the gates of Jerusalem and Antioch, and new kingdoms were planted in the East. This is not the place to follow the Crusaders' fortunes, or the part that the Norman Sicilians played in the great enterprise of the Middle Ages. At least it must make but an incident in my scheme of the Story of the Normans. * * * * * There is a familiar modern sound in the bewailings of our old chroniclers over their taxes. Resentment and pathos were blended then as they are now in such complaints, but though William Rufus was not the least of such extortionate offenders, he gave much of the money back in fine buildings; the [Pg353] famous Great Hall of Westminster was built in his day, and the stout wall that surrounded his father's Tower of London, besides a noble bridge across the Thames. When people expected unfailing generosity and gold thrown to the crowd oftener than in these days, it is difficult to see how the king could satisfy popular expectation without preliminary taxation. Yet the wails of the chroniclers go up like the chirp of the grasshopper. There was one mistaken scheme of benevolence in the endowment of charities, which have borne bitter fruit of pauperism ever since, for which taxation might well have been spared. William Rufus died in the year 1100, in the New Forest. The peasants believed that it was enchanted and accursed, and that evil spirits flew about among the trees on dark and stormy nights. There was a superstition that it was a fated place to those who belonged to the Conqueror's line. Another prince had been killed there, named Richard, too—the son of Duke Robert of Normandy.