=Source.=--Eadmer, _Historia Novorum in Anglia_, ed. Rule, p. 184.
(Rolls Series.)
The character and number of the burdens, under which the whole of
England was crushed at this time, are difficult, I know, to describe.
For the king, leaving Normandy because he could not conquer the whole
of it by the means described above,[28] returned to England to collect
larger supplies of money with which he might go back and subdue the
remainder, disinheriting his brother. In the levying of this money the
collectors showed no regard for pity or mercy, but all men suffered a
ruthless and outrageous exaction, as those who came to us testified.
Indeed you might have seen men who had nothing to give driven from
their own homes, or the doors of their houses torn off and carried
away, and themselves exposed to wholesale plunder; or they were reduced
to extreme poverty, their mean furniture being seized, or at any rate
persecuted and tortured in other shameful ways. Against those who
were thought to have any wealth certain new and ingeniously devised
penalties were charged, and so, when they dared not venture to implead
the king for the defence of their land, their possessions were seized
and themselves reduced to serious distress. But these measures perhaps
will be deemed slight by some, because they were not peculiar to
king Henry’s reign; many a like oppression had been committed under
his brother, not to mention his father king William. Yet they were
thought harder and more intolerable, because much less than usual was
found to be extracted from a people already despoiled and exhausted.
But further, in the council of London ... all priests and monks of
England had been prohibited from marriage, and this prohibition,
during Anselm’s exile, had been violated by many, who still retained
or at least took back their wives. The king, refusing to allow this
sin to go unpunished, ordered his ministers to implead the offenders
and take fines from them to expiate their sin. But since many of them
were found innocent of this offence, the money demanded for the king’s
use amounted to a smaller sum than the collectors could have desired.
Therefore they changed their plan, the innocent were involved with the
guilty in a universal charge, and all parish churches were put in the
king’s debt and every one ordered to be redeemed by the parson who
served God therein. It was pitiful to behold. When the fury of this
exaction was at its height, and some men, who either had nothing to
give, or, in detestation of the outrageous measure, refused to give on
such a ground, and were contemptuously robbed, imprisoned and tortured,
the king chanced to come to London; there nearly two hundred priests
assembled, it is said, robed in their albs and priestly stoles, and
with naked feet approached the king on his way to the palace. But,
as it happened, his thoughts were much occupied, and he was entirely
unmoved to pity by their prayers, or at any rate deemed them unworthy
of the honour of an answer, as if they were men destitute of all
religion, and ordered them to be driven at once out of his sight. Their
confusion thus worse confounded, they approached the queen and begged
her to intercede; but though, it is said, she was moved by pity to
tears, she was held back by fear from intervening.