According to the common
report," says Sir F. Palgrave, "sixty thousand knights received their
fees, or rather their livings, to use the old expression, from the
Conqueror. This report is exaggerated as to number; but the race of the
Anglo-Danish and English nobility and gentry, the Earls and the greater
Thanes, disappears; and with some exceptions, remarkable as exemplifying
the general rule, all the superiorities of the English soil became
vested in the Conqueror's Baronage. Men of a new race and order, men of
strange manners and strange speech, ruled in England. There were,
however, some great mitigations, and the very sufferings of the
conquered were so inflicted as to become the ultimate means of national
prosperity; but they were to be gone through, and to be attended with
much present desolation and misery. The process was the more painful
because it was now accompanied by so much degradation and contumely. The
Anglo-Saxons seem to have had a very strong aristocratic feeling,--a
great respect for family and dignity of blood. The Normans, or rather
the host of adventurers whom we must of necessity comprehend under the
name of Normans, had comparatively little; and not very many of the real
old and powerful aristocracy, whether of Normandy or Brittany, settled
in England. The great majority had been rude, and poor, and despicable
in their own country,---the rascallions of Northern Gaul: these,
suddenly enriched, lost all compass and bearing of mind; and no one
circumstance vexed the spirit of the English more, than to see the fair
and noble English maidens and widows compelled to accept these
despicable adventurers as their husbands. Of this we have an example in
Lucia, the daughter of Algar, for Talboys seems to have been a person of
the lowest degree." Ivo Talboys, or Taillebois, was one of the
Conqueror's followers, and his chief gave him lands in the fen country,
near the monastery of Croyland; and this chance of a locality may have
had something to do with the reputation he has, for it brought him under
the lash of the famous Ingulphus, Chronicler of Croyland, (if he was
that Chronicler,) who charges him with all manner of crimes,--and with
reason good, for he bore himself with great harshness toward the
brethren of the great Croyland monastery,--an unpardonable offence. Low
as he was by birth, Taillebois received the hand of Lucia, sister of the
Saxon Earls Edwin and Morcar, and became very wealthy. From this un