signed,--not by his name--but his mark, for the Conqueror of England
(from whom Victoria is twenty-fifth remove in descent), could not write
his name.

He built the Tower of London, to hold the City in restraint. Fortress,
palace, prison, it stands to-day the grim progenitor of the Castles and
Strongholds which soon frowned from every height in England.

He took the outlawed despised Jew under his protection. Not as a
philanthropist, but seeing in him a being who was always accumulating
wealth, which could in any emergency be wrung from him by torture, if
milder measures failed. Their hoarded treasure flowed into the land.
They built the first stone houses, and domestic architecture was
created. Jewish gold built Castles and Cathedrals, and awoke the
slumbering sense of beauty. Through their connection with the Jews in
Spain and the East, knowledge of the physical sciences also streamed
into the land, and an intellectual life was revived, which bore fruit a
century and a half later in Roger Bacon.

[Sidenote: "Domesday Book." Meeting at Salisbury Plain. 1036]

All these things were not done in a day. It was twenty years after the
Conquest that William ordered a survey and valuation of all the land,
which was recorded in what was known as "Domesday Book," that he might
know the precise financial resources of his kingdom, and what was due
him on the confiscated estates. Then he summoned all the nobles and
large landholders to meet him at Salisbury Plain, and those shapeless
blocks at "Stonehenge" witnessed a strange scene when 60,000 men there
took solemn oath to support William as King _even against their own
lords_. With this splendid consummation his work was practically