Another signal benefit resulted from the Conquest. It brought to our English soil a host of men renowned in their own persons and those of their descendants for all that is great in art and arms, for all that is noble in knightly enterprise and chivalric feeling. Strike out from the page of history the deeds of the Montfords, the Marmions, the Warrens, the Nevilles, the Percys, the Beauchamps, the Bruces, the Balliols, the Talbots, the Cliffords, and a host of others who fought with William at Hastings, or followed in his wake, what a blank would be left. True, they were not always found contending on the side of liberty and truth; but, on the whole, they contributed to the developement of England’s liberties and enlightenment and power, and left an example of indomitable energy and manly bearing which mankind to the latest ages will do well to copy.
One other view of the subject we must take. England required chastisement, but shall the oppressor on that account go free? The chroniclers most favourable to William do not conceal the harshness and covetousness which disfigured the latter part of his reign. They tell us, too, of the evils which afflicted his age, and pursued him beyond the tomb. His eldest son rose in rebellion against him. Many of his own nobles joined the undutiful youth; even his beloved wife Matilda favoured him. In the New Forest, which he had wrongfully appropriated to his own pleasures, his son Richard was slain, during his lifetime. His son William, who succeeded him, came to a violent end in the same place. A grandson also is said to have perished in it. Whilst ravaging Mantes, in revenge for an idle jest, he met with his own death stroke. No sooner had he ceased to breathe than his lifeless body was forsaken by his family and domestics. When all that remained of the once potent William was about to be committed to the tomb, the man from whom he had wrested the site forbade his burial; some of the bystanders ‘of their charity’ satisfied the claim, and the Conqueror was laid in an eleemosynary grave. At a subsequent period that grave was violated, and his bones dispersed.
His followers, bent upon enriching themselves at the expense of justice, did not escape. Many of them rose in rebellion, and were crushed. Others suffered in the troubles which ensued upon his death. In the struggle between Stephen and Matilda, dreadful was the havoc committed upon the followers of William and their children. During the Wars of the Roses, nearly all the great families founded at the Conquest suffered calamities differing little in kind or degree from those which the victors of Hastings inflicted upon the old nobility of the land. History gives emphasis to the divine injunction, “Fret not thyself because of evil doers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity: for they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb.”