William and after him. Frenchmen who had in Edward's time settled
in England as the land of their own choice, reckoned as Englishmen.
Other enactments, fresh enactments of older laws, touched both
races. The slave trade was rife in its worst form; men were sold
out of the land, chiefly to the Danes of Ireland. Earlier kings
had denounced the crime, and earlier bishops had preached against
it. William denounced it again under the penalty of forfeiture of
all lands and goods, and Saint Wulfstan, the Bishop of Worcester,
persuaded the chief offenders, Englishmen of Bristol, to give up
their darling sin for a season. Yet in the next reign Anselm and
his synod had once more to denounce the crime under spiritual
penalties, when they had no longer the strong arm of William to
enforce them.

Another law bears more than all the personal impress of William.
In it he at once, on one side, forestalls the most humane theories
of modern times, and on the other sins most directly against them.
His remarkable unwillingness to put any man to death, except among
the chances of the battle-field, was to some extent the feeling of
his age. With him the feeling takes the shape of a formal law. He
forbids the infliction of death for any crime whatever. But those
who may on this score be disposed to claim the Conqueror as a
sympathizer will be shocked at the next enactment. Those crimes
which kings less merciful than William would have punished with
death are to be punished with loss of eyes or other foul and cruel
mutilations. Punishments of this kind now seem more revolting than
death, though possibly, now as then, the sufferer himself might
think otherwise. But in those days to substitute mutilation for
death, in the case of crimes which were held to deserve death, was
universally deemed an act of mercy. Grave men shrank from sending