anders, Matilda's father, and there he met Matilda, who fell in
love with him and offered herself in marriage. He refused her, and she
married William; but later, when the cycle of events put her old lover
in the power of her husband, she sued for and obtained the grant of
many of his lands. Brihtric himself was seized at his house at Hanley,
in Worcestershire, on the very day that Wulfstan had hallowed his
chapel, and sent to Winchester, where he died in prison.

This story, which would have made a stirring theme for Sir Walter
Scott, is found in the chronicles of Tewkesbury, in the Anglo-Norman
chronicles, and in Wace, the old rhyming historian of the twelfth
century. Here are a few lines of the old French version:

"Laquele jadsi, quant fu pucele,
Ama un conte dangleterre,
Brictrich Mau le oi nomer
Apres le rois ki fu riche ber;
A lui la pucele enuera messager
Pur sa amour a lui procurer;
Meis Brictrich Maude refusa,
Dune ele m'lt se coruca,
Hastivement mer passa
E a Willam bastard se maria.

which we may put into English so:

"Who formerly, as a maiden,
Loved an English count,
Brihtric Maude heard him named;
And who, save the King, than he was richer?
To him the maiden sent a messenger
To obtain his love;
But Brihtric refused Matilda,
Whereat she waxed very angry,
Hastily passed over the sea
And married William the bastard."

But if this is one of the stories which is preserved to us, with its
fierce love, and its fierce hate, and its unsparing revenge, and all
the human hopes and acts and motives of which it gives but a bare
hint--the pride of Brihtric perhaps, or perhaps his love for another
woman, for an alliance with the Count of Flanders might satisfy an
ambitious man--how many tragic dramas, how many stories of cruelty and
oppression and exile and mourning, lie behind the bare short records of
the Domesday Book? All these sunny towns of North Devon and
Somerset--Lynton, Crinton, Porlock, Countisbury, Paracombe,
Challacombe, and north to Dunster, and south to Barnstaple and
Bideford--all these wooded or wind-swept spots, which look as if they
could have had no history, save of market-days and fairs, had their
individual drama in that fierce annexation.

Sometimes, perhaps, they suffered hardly at all. Their Saxon lord
lived elsewhere; he was slain or banished, and they came imperceptibly
under the Norman rule. But more often, I imagine, particularl