in-chief at that period, including ecclesiastical corporations, amounted scarcely to 1400. What proportion of these were greater barons, and by virtue of their tenure were bound to attend the king at his great councils, we have no means of ascertaining for the early Norman period. In the reign of Henry III. their number is stated at 150; and this is probably in excess of the attendance in earlier reigns. Besides, however, this territorial and feudal nobility, there was a rank which was strictly personal, and which, though connected with the possession of landed property, does not appear to have been specially attached to any particular locality; this was the dignity of earl. The Saxon earldormen were lord-lieutenants of particular counties, or groups of counties, the government of which they actually administered, and the profits of which they received for their own or the crown's use through their deputies the sheriffs. But except in the cases of county-palatines, such as Chester and Pembroke, and the northern counties, which formed the old earldom of Northumberland, and whose unsettled condition and remote position required a more immediate local administration, the Norman "earls" had no authority in the counties whose names they bore, nor any influence beyond that attaching to their large possessions in any particular district. They were girt with the sword of a particular county, and received a grant of the third penny of the pleas of this county. Their hereditary title was in strictness derived from this county. Their landed property might or might not be within it; but they themselves were usually called by their Christian names only, as "Earl Roger" (who was actually Earl of Salop); or sometimes with the affix of one of their principal manors or castles, as, "Earl William de Arundel" (Earl of Sussex), and "Earl Richard de Clare" (Earl of Hertford). The manor of Clare was in Suffolk. The Conqueror and his successors, although they sometimes granted vast estates to one individual, and the bulk of these might also sometimes lie in one particular county (as in the case of the Lords Marchers), always took care that the remainder should be either scattered through a number of other counties, or situated in an entirely different part of the country. They thus took good security that the kingdom should not again (as in the times of the Saxon princes) be mapped out into a certain number of self-contained and defined satrapies. Thus the vast possessions of Odo, Bishop of Baieux, were distributed through seventeen counties; those of Robert of Mortain through nineteen, besides his property in Wales. Eudes, surnamed Dapifer, had fees in twelve counties; Hugh of Avranches, surnamed Lupus, besides the county-palatine of Chester, had considerable possessions in twenty-one other shires.

It is not surprising, then, that with such widely-scattered lands, and so much vagueness in their mode of designation, we should often find ourselves confused and mistaken as to the identity of persons alluded to by the earlier chroniclers. To this confusion the insecurity of the tenure of lands, and the frequent changes and confiscations, contribute not a little. "The king, says the angry Saxon chronicler, "sold out his lands as dear as dearest he might; and then some other man came and bid more than the first had given, and the king granted them to him who offered the larger sum; then came a third and bid yet more; and the king made over the lands to him who offered most of all." Then the whole age was one of conspiracy and revolt throughout England and Normandy. The lands of the revolted English were granted to Normans. These Anglo-Normans, in their turn conspiring and revolting, lost their lands to other foreigners, or, on rare occasions, to Saxons who performed remarkable service to the crown. During the struggles between Duke Robert of Normandy and his brothers, the younger sons of the Conqueror, the lands and dignities of England changed hands as rapidly as in the later wars of the Roses. Several great Norman lords, finding it impossible to preserve a firm hold on their possessions in both Normandy and England, abandoned the latter country altogether; and their lordships were regranted by the crown to resident barons. Others, on account of their flagrant tyranny and rapacity, were stripped of their English possessions altogether by the juster policy of Henry I.; and, to the great delight of the oppressed Saxons, were driven back across the seas into Normandy. Such, in the year 1110, was the fate of Philip of Braiose, William Malet, and William Bainard; "although all men of noble blood, and of approved fidelity to the royal house. To the first one alone, after a lapse of some years, was permission to return granted. The name of the last-mentioned disappeared from that time from among the noble races of England; and his memory is preserved only in the name of one of the wards of London, where, on the river's bank, stood Bainard's castle until swept away by the great conflagration of 1666." The reign (if it can be so called) of Stephen, when England was divided between two hostile camps, and the allegiance of her nobles between two rival sovereigns, still further obliterated the original distributions of the Conqueror; and the royal circuits of justice made by the first Plantagenet swept a yet greater number of noble names from the baronial roll: hence comparatively few of the descendants of the greatest barons of the Conquest are to be found among the leading nobility of the Plantagenet period. The fate of some of this first generation of noble families we can trace, though the majority disappear silently from the

drama. The Earl Roger," to whom we have already alluded

the "Comes Rogerus" of Domesday Survey-was the son of Hugh Count of Montgomery in Normandy, and was nearly allied to the Conqueror, whom he accompanied to England, commanding the centre of the invading army at the battle of Hastings. William's charge to him is chronicled in the Roman de Rou:

"William upon his war-horse went;
Unto Roger his way he bent
(He who is called of Montgomery):
Form,' he said, 'I trust in ye;
On this side shall your battle go,

On this side shall ye charge the foe.'"*

Roger well fulfilled his trust-slaying in single combat a gallant Saxon, whose prowess had struck terror into the hearts of the Normans:

"Dunc s'ecria: Ferez, Franceiz!

Nostre est li champ sor les Engleiz!''

He was richly rewarded by the Conqueror. In Sussex he had no less than seventy-seven lordships bestowed upon him, and in Shropshire he obtained nearly the whole county. His chief residences were his castles of Shrewsbury and Arundel; and this is a curious fact in connection with the claim to the earldom of Arundel advanced in later years in virtue of mere possession of this latter castle. Earl Roger is called occasionally Earl of Shrewsbury, as well as Earl of Arundel; but that both these were simply descriptions of him by his places of residence, or in modern phrase his "addresses," is clear, as according to the usages of the period in question neither the towns nor castles of Shrewsbury or Arundel could confer the title of an English earl; and such dignity, if vested in Roger de Montgomery, must have been derived from the county of Salop, where, according to Selden, he possessed palatine authority. He died in 1094, and was succeeded in his English possessions by his second son, Hugh. His eldest son, Robert, styled de Belesme, after his mother Mabel, heiress of Alençon and Belesme, attached himself to the fortunes of young Robert of Normandy; and during the contests between the Conqueror and his son, the family of Montgomery (with many others) was similarly divided between father and son. On the death of Hugh de Montgomery in 1098, his brother, Robert de Belesme, purchased the earldom or county of Salop from William Rufus for 3000l. In the sub

*Willame sist sor son destrier;

Venir a fet avant Rogier
(Ke l'en dist de Montgomeri):
Forment,' dist-il, en vos me fi;

De cele part de là ireiz,

De cele part les assaldreiz.'"

sequent fraternal dissensions, he was driven into exile by King Henry I., and was afterwards seized in Normandy and brought to England, where he died a prisoner in Wareham Castle in 1118, after a confinement of four years. His talents were of a high order; but his character is portrayed in the darkest colours by contemporary chroniclers. Henry of Huntingdon says, somewhat wildly, "he was a very Pluto, Megæra, Cerberus, or any thing you can conceive still more horrible." His great possessions of course passed to the crown, and the earldom became extinct in his family. Another great name during the early Norman period was that of Fitz-Osberne: William Fitz-Osberne, Count of Bretville, or Breteuil, in Normandy, is pronounced by Dr. Lappenberg, in his laborious and valuable History of the Norman Kings, to have been "the most faithful and most sagacious counsellor" that the Conqueror had ever possessed. He was related to the ducal house, and succeeded to the office of seneschal of Normandy, which had been enjoyed by his father. To his vast riches the founding of a monastery at Lyre, where his wife Adeliza lies buried, and of another at Cormely, where he himself is interred, bear witness. He was connected with the Anglo-Saxon royal race, and had probably visited the English court before the Conquest. His brother, the chaplain Osberne, was certainly a resident there previously. In his youth he had mainly contributed to the capture of Domfront, and afterwards maintained the newly erected castle of Breteuil against the king of France. To his discrimination the Duke William was indebted for the acquisition of the services of Archbishop Lanfranc, and thereby the friendship of the Papal chair, so important an element in the designs of the duke upon the English crown. To these projects it was he who induced the Norman barons, against their inclination, to lend a favourable ear. In the organisation of the expedition, he is said by his counsels to have guarded the duke equally against undue haste and procrastination; and at the battle of Hastings he commanded the van of the army. To him was then allotted, as his peculiar duty, the conquest of the Isle of Wight, which he successfully achieved. As a reward he had bestowed upon him the earldom of Hereford, and afterwards the government of the north of England. In this position, "his great liberality to the military, whereby he preserved the people from pillage, and at the same time rendered them well disposed towards him, gained him such universal esteem, that the king, although mistrustful and irritated against him, durst not venture to counteract him; and his laws, although at variance with those of the rest of England, were regarded as valid after the lapse of a century." The king's jealousy, however,

C C

soon removed him from York, and he was appointed, conjointly with Queen Matilda, to the lieutenancy of Normandy. Here, as one of the guardians of the young Count Arnulf of Flanders, he involved himself in hostilities with his ward's paternal uncle, Robert the Frisian, and fell in an ambush of the latter, at the commencement of the year 1071. His death so incensed his countrymen, that it required all the energy of the Conqueror to prevent the outbreak of a war with Flanders. His inheritance was divided: his elder son, William, had his father's fiefs in Normandy; his younger son, Roger, succeeded to the earldom of Hereford, and all that his father had acquired in England. The career of the new earl was brief and disastrous. In defiance of the prohibition of the king, he had given his sister Emma in marriage to Earl Ralph of Guader, an Englishman's son by a Breton mother, on whom the king had bestowed "the Consulate of the East Angles, or counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridge." At the marriage festivities, which were held at Ixning in Cambridgeshire, a conspiracy was formed against the king, into which Earl Waltheof the Saxon was also drawn; but the latter, through repentance or pusillanimity, betrayed the plot to Archbishop Lanfranc, who was governing the kingdom during the absence of William in Normandy. The archbishop, mindful of the old bond of friendship between Earl Roger's father and himself, endeavoured, first by written representations, and next by the spiritual weapon of excommunication, to withdraw him from his rebellion. In the mean time he was held in check by an armed force under the Bishop of Worcester; while Ralph Guader was easily crushed and driven to Denmark by an army under Bishop Odo. The contest was ineffectually renewed by Earl Ralph, with the assistance of the Danish king; but he gained no fresh footing in England, and ultimately died in exile in the Holy Land. The rebellion of the Norman Earl Roger was, however, a more important affair, and King William himself hastened from Normandy, and cited his vassal to answer for his conduct before his court. "Roger hesitated not to appear, relying on his near relationship to the king; but he was declared, according to the Norman law, to have forfeited all his honours and possessions, and condemned to perpetual imprisonment. Even then his haughty spirit did not desert him, but served to exasperate the king still more against him; for when William on Easter-day had sent him a rich suit of clothes, he ordered a large fire to be kindled, and burnt them. He outlived the king, and died in prison and in fetters." His male issue speedily became extinct; but the husband of his niece and heir, Amicia, had granted to him by Stephen the county, borough, and castle of Hereford, unaccom