William, in common with all the great men of the time, was passionately addicted to the chase; a pastime he indulged in at the expense of his unhappy subjects. Not content with the royal domains, he resolved to make a new forest near Winchester, his usual place of abode, and for this purpose laid waste a tract of country extending above thirty miles, expelling the inhabitants from their houses, and seizing on their property, without affording them the least compensation; neither did he respect the churches and convents--the possessions of the clergy as well as laity being alike confiscated to his pleasures. At the same time he enacted penalties more severe than had hitherto been known in England, against hunting in any of the royal forests. The killing of a deer, wild boar, or hare, was punished by the loss of the offender's eyes--and that at a time when the slaying of a fellow-creature might be atoned by the payment of a fine. The death of William's son Richard there, and afterwards of William Rufus, were regarded as judgments from heaven for the sacrilege committed in the making of the forest.
The transactions recorded during the remainder of this reign may be considered more as domestic occurrences which concern the prince, than as national events which regard England. Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, the king's uterine brother, whom he had created Earl of Kent, and entrusted with a great share of power during his whole reign, had amassed immense riches; and, agreeably to the usual progress of human wishes, he began to regard his present acquisitions as but a step to further grandeur. He had formed the chimerical project of buying the papacy; and though Gregory, the reigning pope, was not of advanced years, the prelate had confided so much in the predictions of an astrologer, that he reckoned on the pontiff's death, and on attaining, by his own intrigues and money, that envied state of greatness. Resolving, therefore, to go to Italy with something like an army, he had persuaded many barons, and among the rest Hugh, Earl of Chester, to take the same course, in hopes that when he should mount the Papal throne, he would bestow on them more considerable establishments in that country. The king, from whom all these projects had been carefully concealed, at last got intelligence of the design, and ordered Odo to be arrested. His officers, from respect to the immunities which the ecclesiastics now assumed, scrupled to execute the command, till the king himself was obliged in person to seize him; and when Odo insisted that he was a prelate, and exempt from all temporal jurisdiction, William replied that he arrested him not as Bishop of Bayeux, but as Earl of Kent. He was sent prisoner to Normandy, and, notwithstanding the remonstrances and menaces of Gregory, was kept in confinement during the remainder of William's reign.