domains these Norman intruders were fattening.

"Oh! it is too hard to bear," thought the poor lad.

And then he saw the unfortunate thralls of his father, ground down
by the tyranny of these Norman lords and their soldiery, forced to
draw stone and timber, like beasts of burden, for the purpose of
building towers and dungeons for their oppressors, urged on with
the lash if they faltered.

Since the death of their good lady, all this had been, of course,
much worse.

And then, those forest laws, so vilely cruel. Wilfred saw men blind
with one eye, or wanting a hand; and why? Because they had killed a
hare or wounded a deer; for it would have been a hanging matter to
kill the red hart.

Meanwhile he was growing in mind and body; he had now passed his
seventeenth birthday, and was beginning to think himself a man; but
where were the vassals whose leader and chieftain he was born to
be?--where?

The people of Aescendune were diminishing daily--the English people
thereof, we should say, for the places of those who fled their
homes, and went no one knew whither, were filled by Normans,
French, Bretons, or other like "cattle," as Wilfred called them in
his wrath.

Everywhere he heard the same "jabbering" tongue, that Norman