mandy into the disputed realm. Each side had
promised them, for their pay, the lands and wealth of the other. Like
vultures to the feast they came, with little heed to the rights of the
rival claimants and the wrongs of the people, with much heed to their
own private needs and ambitions.

In England such anarchy ruled as that land of much intestine war has
rarely witnessed. The Norman nobles prepared in haste for the civil war,
and in doing so made the English their prey. To raise the necessary
funds, many of them sold their domains, townships, and villages, with
the inhabitants thereof and all their goods. Others of them made forays
on the lands of those of the opposite faction, and seized cattle,
horses, sheep, and men alike carrying off the English in chains, that
they might force them by torture to yield what wealth they possessed.

Terror ruled supreme. The realm was in a panic of dread. So great was
the alarm, that the inhabitants of city and town alike took to flight if
they saw a distant group of horsemen approaching. Three or four armed
men were enough to empty a town of its inhabitants. It was in Bristol,
where Maud and her foreign troops lay, that the most extreme terror
prevailed. All day long men were being brought into the city bound and
gagged. The citizens had no immunity. Soldiers mingled among them in
disguise, their arms concealed, their talk in the English tongue,
strolling through markets and streets, listening to the popular chat,
and then suddenly seizing any one who seemed to be in easy
circumstances. These they would drag to their head-quarters and hold to
ransom.

The air was filled with tales of the frightful barbarities practised by
the Norman nobles on the unhappy English captives in the depths of their
gloomy castles. "They carried off," says the Saxon chronicle, "all who
they thought possessed any property, men and women, by day and by night;
and whilst they kept them imprisoned, they inflicted on them tortures,
such as no martyr ever underwent, in order to obtain gold and silver
from them." We must be excused from quoting the details of these
tortures.

"They killed many thousands of people by hunger," continues the
chronicle. "They imposed tribute after tribute upon the towns and
villages, calling this in their tongue _tenserie_. When the citizens had
nothing more to give them, they plundered and burnt the town. You might
have travelled a whole day without finding a single soul in th