Excerpt from Lives of the English Saints: St. Gilbert, Prior of Sempringham And race. If he was stern, it was with a calm and majestic sternness, very different from the bestial fury of his son the Red King. On his death-bed he de elared that it was on principle that he had put in prison innocent men, because they were dangerous.1 In the beginning of his reign England had a prospect of peace, when he went back to Normandy and dis played to his noble visitors the beauty of the long haired sons of England and its gold-tipped drinking horns, and congratulated himself on his easy conquest. His policy in the first years of his reign tended to effect a quiet and gradual amalgamation of the Norman and Saxon races. He married Saxon maidens to his nobles, and though he gave the lands of Englishmen to his followers, yet on the other hand he transplanted Englishmen to the continent and endowed them with Norman fiefs. His administration of the law, though stern, was rigidly just, and it was said that a girl laden with gold might pass through England unharmed. He did not Oppress the poor it was rather the noble who felt his iron yoke, and probably the Saxon serf was not worse off under his Norman lord than under the Saxon Thane. The Englishmen had already begun to clip their long hair and to adopt Norman fashions, when the rising under earl Morcar took place, and the bean tiful and generous Edwin treacherously perished, to the universal grief of England. The Conqueror shed some tears over him, but from that moment he seems to have been convinced that a gentle hand could not rule Eng land, and his inexorable policy began. Again, it should not be forgotten that in his exercise of Church pa tronage, he was free from simony, the besetting sin of. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.