r than any of their brothers,
even those who were not so bad as Robert. She may therefore not have
been wholly unfit for the post in which she was set when her father put
her at the head of his newly founded abbey, though she could hardly have
been qualified according to the rule which Gregory the Great laid down
for the monasteries of Sicily, that no abbess should be under sixty
years of age.

The troubles of Abbess Emma began in the year 1102, when her brother
Robert was happily driven out of England, with his brothers and his
whole followings and belongings. It might seem a little hard when King
Henry, in getting rid of the whole stock, seized on the English lands
which Earl Roger had given to his daughter's Norman Abbey. But we
remember that, in so doing, he was forestalling, not the Eighth of his
name, but the Fifth. We did not want alien priories in England. Robert
came back to his native Normandy, began to work every kind of mischief
there, and his brothers Arnulf and Roger helped him for awhile in so
doing. Arnulf is famous at Pembroke.[52] Roger the _Poitevin_, so called
from his marriage, had been lord of that land between Mersey and
Ribble, which afterwards went to patch up the modern shire of Lancaster.
Presently the brothers quarrelled. Robert of Belleme refused to give
Arnulf and Roger any share in their father's inheritance. Then they
forsook him, and Arnulf took an active part against him on behalf of
Duke Robert. We read how, in June, 1103, he seized his brother's
_munitio_ of Almeneches, and how it was occupied for the Duke. This was
dangerous to his sister's abbey, where his followers did not scruple to
occupy the buildings and to stable their horses in the church. Then
Robert of Belleme, looking on the abbey as a hostile fortress, comes
down on Almeneches, burns the church and all the buildings of the
monastery, and leaves his sister and her nuns to find shelter where they
can. The Duke's followers, who fall into his hands, he deals with after
his manner; they are killed, mutilated, or kept in hard bonds. Robert of
Belleme, it must be remembered, is the man of whom it was said that he
refused ransom for his prisoners, despising gain, compared with the
keener pleasure of tormenting them. The Duke then and his following set
forth to do something against the hateful tyrant--"_odibilis tyrannus_"
he is called, a phrase in which we must not forget the ancient sense of
"_tyrannus_."[53] Counts and lords ar