OLD  CLEEVE ABBEY. 71 
of the reign of Henry Ill. Under these cirecumstances, 
the life of a great Norman Baron, like William Moion, or 
De Mohun, at Dunster, settled soon after the Conquest in 
a remote and wild district, and one in which the family of 
Godwin had held great possessions, must have been one of 
constant warfare. Every act of power on his part would 
. be resented as an usurpation, and desperately resisted. 
Such a state of things could produce but one effect ; the 
ruling party became tyrants of the worst description—the 
ruled, sullen and obstinate, and ready, when occasion 
offered, to retaliate on their oppressors the sufferings > 
‘ had undergone. 
That this was the case with the English in the reign of 
Stephen, the Saron Chronicle informs us, in the following 
words, as translated by Ingram :— 
“They (that is, the Norman nobles) eruelly oppressed 
the wretched men of the land with castle works, and when 
the castles were made they filled them with devils and evil 
men ; then took they those whom they supposed to have 
any goods, both by night and day, men and women, and 
threw them into prison for their gold and silver, and in- 
flieted on them unutterable tortures, for never were any 
martyrs so tortured as they were ; some they hanged up: 
by the feet, and smoked them with foul smoke, and some 
by the thumbs or by the head, and hung coats of mail on 
their feet. They tyed knotted strings about their heads, 
and twisted them till the pain went to the brains ; they put 
them into dungeons, wherein were snakes and toads, and 
so destroyed them; some they placed in a crucet-house, 
that is in a chest that is short and narrow and not deep, 
wherein they put sharp stones, and so thrust the man there- 
in, that they broke all his limbs. In many of the castles 
were things loathsome and grim called “ Sachenteges,’ ‚of 
