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Had the King possessed the immense revenues of his predecessors he might perhaps have set their enmity at defiance; but during the wars between Stephen and Maud, and afterward between John and his barons, the royal demesnes had been considerably diminished; and the occasional extravagance of Henry, joined to his impolitic generosity to his favorites, repeatedly compelled him to throw himself on the voluntary benevolence of the nation.
He divided all the lands of England, with very few exceptions, beside the royal demesnes, into baronies, and he conferred these, with the reservation of stated services and payments, on the most considerable of his adventurers.
The melodies of the new school began close to the ear and died away in distances of the soul. Even as the prophet of old was warned to take off his shoes because the place he stood on was holy ground, so it seemed for a while in Ireland as if no poet could be accepted unless he left outside the demesnes of poetry that very useful animal, the body, and lost all concern about its habits.
The small, insignificant figure took instant dignity; the homely dress, of rough dark broadcloth, was the natural and becoming dishabille of a country gentleman in his own demesnes. Even the ugly cur became a Scotch terrier of the rarest breed. My guide smiled good-naturedly at my stupor; and patting me on the shoulder, said, "It is the gardener you must apologize to, not me.
By name, this youth is Guillaume Mallet, sometimes styled De Graville, because our Norman gentilhommes, forsooth, must always now have a 'de' tacked to their names; nevertheless he hath no other right to the seigneurie of Graville, which appertains to the head of his house, than may be conferred by an old tower on one corner of the demesnes so designated, with lands that would feed one horse and two villeins if they were not in pawn to a Jew for moneys to buy velvet mantelines and a chain of gold.
Between the land near the town devoted to private demesnes, laid out for glory and beauty, and the lands wasted of inhabitants, you can travel miles and miles on more than one side of Castlebar and see scarcely a tenant; a herd's cabin, a police station, being the only houses. As soon as we come to barren land over-run with stones, tenant houses become thicker.
On one side of the mountain flowed a river. A small eminence, surrounded by breastworks, commanded the only passage which the freebooters could follow. The whole country round was thick forest, through whose rock-guarded demesnes not the slightest indication of a path could be seen.
Already in the reign of Charlemagne, Guillaume au Court-Nez, or "William with the Short Nose," had defended the little town of Orange against the assaults of the Saracens. The interest and authority acquired in the demesnes thus preserved by his valor became extensive, and in process of time hereditary in his race.
The overpowering might of the big houses in their green demesnes made her feel smaller and wearier, but big with bitterness. She would have been glad to have a suit-case full of bombs to blow those snobbish residences into flinders. She was dog tired when, after losing her way again and again, she reached the boarding-house where the dancers lodged.
Not content with the immense treasures amassed by his father, he drew in vast sums by the sale of almost all the demesnes of the crown, and of every office under it, not excepting those of the highest trust. The clergy, whose wealth and policy enabled them to take advantage of the necessity and weakness of the Croises, were generally the purchasers of both.
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