78 PAPERS, ETC. 
which two or three men had enough to bear one. It was 
thus made: that is, fastened to a beam, and they placed a 
sharp iron collar about the man’s throat and neck, so that 
he eould in no direction either sit, or lie, or sleep, but bear 
all that iron. Many thousands they wore out with hunger. 
I neither can, nor may ], tell all the wounds and all the 
pains they inflicted on wretched men in this land. This 
lasted the 19 winters, while Stephen was King; and it grew 
continually worse and worse. They constantly laid guilds 
on the towns, and called it “tenserie’; and when the 
wretehed men had-no more to give, they plundered and 
burnt all the towns, that well thou mightest go a whole 
day’s journey and never shouldest thou find a man sitting 
in a town, nor the land tilled. Then was corn dear, and 
flesh and cheese, and butter, for none there was in the land; 
wretched men starved for hunger ; some had recourse to 
alms who were once rich “men, and some fled out of the 
land ; never yet was there more wretchedness in the land, 
nor ever did heathen men worse than they did, for after a 
time they spared neither church nor churchyard, but took 
all the goods that were therein, and then burned the church 
and alltogether. Neither did they spare a bishop’s land, nor 
an abbot’s, nor a priest’s, but plundered both monk’s and 
clerk’s, and every man robbed another who could. If two 
or three men came riding to a town all the township fled, 
for they concluded them to be robbers. The bishops and 
learned men cursed them continually, but the effect thereof 
was nothing to them, for they were all accursed and for- 
sworn and abandoned ; to till the ground was to plough 
the sea ; the earth bore no corn, for the land was all laid 
waste by such deeds ; and they said openly that Christ 
slept and his Saints.’ 
Such was the miserable oppression from which the Saxons, 
