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• History of the Conquest of England By the Normans.
• Book VIII.: From the Battle of the Standard to the Insurrection of the Poitevins and Bretons Against Henry II. 1137—1189.
• Book IX.: From the Origin of the Quarrel Between King Henry II. And Archbishop Thomas Beket, to the Murder of the Archbishop. 1160—1171.
• Book X.: From the Invasion of Ireland By the Normans Established In England to the Death of Henry II. 1171—1189.
• Book XI.: From the Accession of King Richard I. To the Execution of the Saxon, William Longbeard. 1190—1196.
• Conclusion.
• I.: The Continental Normans and Bretons; the Angevins and the Populations of Southern Gaul.
• II.: The Inhabitants of Wales.
• III.: The Scots.
• IV.: The Native Irish and the Anglo-norman Irish.
• V.: The Anglo-normans and the English By Race.
• Magna Charta.
• Charta Forestæ. Made At Westminster, 10 Th Feb., Anno 9 Hen. III. Ad 1225, and Confirmed Anno 28 Edw. I. Ad 1299.
• Appendix.
• No. I.: Cruelties Exercised By the Norman-lords In Their Castles. 1
• No. II. (page 51.): War Song of the Troubadour Bertrand De Born, Seigneur De Hautefort. 1
• No. III. (page 139.): History of the Marriage of Gilbert Beket, Father of Archbishop Thomas; Fragment of a Life of the Archbishop, By a Contemporary. 3
• No. IV. (page 139.): Old Ballad On the Captivity and Marriage of Gilbert Beket. 1
• No. V. (page 139.): Particulars of the Worldly Life of Thomas Becket, Before His Elevation to the Bishopric, From William Fitzstephen, His Secretary. 1
• No. VI. (page 139.): Letter of John of Salisbury to Becket, Respecting the Views of the King of France, the Earl of Flanders, and the Court of Rome, Concerning Him.
• No. VII. (page 139.): Letter Relative to the Intrigues of Henry II. At the Court of Rome, and the Mission of Two Legates Into France. 1 ( Ad 1169.)
• No. VIII. (page 139.): Letter Op Thomas Beket to Cardinal Albert, On the Conduct of the Court of Rome Towards Him. 1 ( Ad 1170.)
• No. IX. (page 139.): Letter From Thomas Beket’s Companions In Exile to Cardinal Albert, On the Injustice of the Court of Rome, and the Conduct of the Cardinals Towards Them. 1 ( Ad 1170.)
• No. X. (page 139.): Letter of John of Salisbury On the Landing of Thomas Beket, and His Reception In England. 1 ( Ad 1170.)
• No. XI. (page 139.): Extract From a Letter of John of Salisbury, Relative to the Murder of Thomas Beket. 1 ( Ad 1171.)
• No. XII. (page 139.): Narrative of the Murder of Thomas Beket, By Edward Grim, Who Was Wounded While Endeavouring to Defend Him. 1
• No. XIII. (page 139.): Letter From King Louis VII. To Pope Alexander III., Demanding Vengeance Against the Murderers of Thomas Beket. 1 ( Ad 1171.)
• No. XIV. (page 139.): Letter From Thibault, Earl of Blois, to Pope Alexander III., On the Murder of Thomas Beket. 2 ( Ad 1171.)
• No. XV. (page 139.): Letter In Which the Bishop of Lisieux, On the Part of All the Prelates of Normandy, Relates to the Pope the Conduct of Henry II. After the Murder of Thomas Beket. 1 ( Ad 1171.)
• No. XVI. (page 139.): Letter From Henry II. To the Pope, On the Subject of the Murder of Thomas Beket. 1 ( Ad 1171.)
• No. XVII. (page 139.): Letter From Henry II. To the Pope, On the Subject of the Rebellion of His Sons. 1 ( Ad 1173.)
• No. XVIII. (page 167.): Political Poems of Bertrand De Born, Preceded By the Historical Notices Given In the Manuscripts At the Head of Each of the Productions of This Troubadour.
• No. XIX. (page 220.): Sirvente of Richard Cœur-de-lion On His Captivity. 1
• No. XX. (page 223.): The King’s Disguise, and Friendship With Robin Hood. 2
• No. XXI. (page 224.): The Birth of Robin Hood. 1
• No. XXII. (page 237.): Sirvente of Bertrand De Born to Induce the Kings of France and England to Go to War. 1
• No. XXIII. (page 237.): Another Sirvente of Bertrand De Born, to the Same Purpose. 1
• No. XXIV. (page 240.): Sirvente of the Dauphin of Auvergne On His Quarrel With the King of England. 1
• No. XXV. (page 280.): Treaty of Alliance Between Lewellyn Ap-griffith, King of North Wales, With the King of France, Philip-le-hardi. 1
• No. XXVI. (page 282.): List of the Company of Yvain of Wales. 1
• No. XXVII. (page 282.): List of the Company of John Wynn. 1
• No. XXVIII. (page 282.): Receipt Given By Robin-ap-llwydin, and List of His Company. 1
• No. XXIX. (page 282.): List of the Company of Edward-ap-owen. 1
• No. XXX. (page 282.): List of the Company of Owen-ap Griffith, and Receipt Given Him. 1
• No. XXXI. (page 283.): Agreement of Yvain De Galles With King Charles V. For a Sum of 300,000 Francs D’or, and Alliance Made Between Them and Their Subjects. 2
• No. XXXII. (page 287.): Letter From Owen Glendowr, Prince of Wales, to the King of France, Charles VI. 1
• No. XXXIII. (page 303.): The Souters of Selkirk At the Battle of Flodden Field, a Scottish Ballad of the Sixteenth Century.
• No. XXXIV. (page 316.): The Battle of Bothwell Bridge—a Scottish

BOOK XI.

FROM THE ACCESSION OF KING RICHARD I. TO THE EXECUTION OF THE SAXON, WILLIAM LONGBEARD.

1190—1196.

The impossibility of combining every fact in one narrative, now compels the historian to return to the epoch at which Henry II. received from pope Alexander III. the bull investing him with the lordship of all Ireland. The king hereupon immediately despatched the Normans, William Fitz-Elme, and Nicholas, dean of Wallingford, who, on their arrival in Ireland, convoked a synod of all the high clergy of the newly conquered provinces.1 The diploma of Alexander III. and the bull of Adrian IV. were solemnly read in this assembly, and ratified by the Irish bishops, involved by their first submission in fresh acts of weakness. Several, however, soon repented, and took part in the conspiracies which were secretly carried on in the places occupied by the Norman garrisons, or even in the open resistance of the still free provinces on the Shannon and the Boyne. Lawrence, archbishop of Dublin, one of the first who had sworn fealty to the conqueror, engaged in several patriotic insurrections, and from the friend of the foreigners, became the object of their hatred and persecution.2 They replaced him by a Norman, John Comine, who, to accomplish his new mission, conducted himself in such sort towards the natives, that his countrymen gave him, in jest, the surname of Ecorche-villain.3

In a few years, the conquest extended as far as the eastern and southern frontiers of the kingdoms of Connaught and Ulster. A line of fortresses and palisadoed redoubts, stretching along the frontier of the invaded territory, procured it the Norman appellation of Pal or the Pale. Every foreign baron, knight, or squire, quartered within the Pale, had taken care to fortify his domain; each had a castle, great or small, according to his rank and wealth. The lowest class of the conquering army, and in particular the English soldiers, labourers, or merchants, dwelt together in entrenched camps, formed round the castles of their leaders, or in the towns which the natives had partly abandoned. The English language was spoken in the streets and market-places of these towns, and the French in the fortresses newly erected by the lords of the conquest. All the names of these chiefs that history has preserved, are French, as Raymond de Caen, Guillaume Ferrand, Guillaume Maquerel, Robert Digarre, Henri Bluet, Jean de Courcy, Hughes le Petit, and the numerous family of the Fitz-Geraulds, who were also called Gerauldines.1 Thus the English who had come to Ireland in the train of the Anglo-Normans, were in a middle state between the latter and the natives, and their language, the most despised in their own country, held in the island of Erin an intermediate rank between that of the new government and the Gallic idiom of the conquered. All that remained of Irish population within the inclosure of the Pale, or the Anglo-Norman territory, was soon confounded in one common servitude, no distinction remaining between the friend of the foreigners and the man who had resisted them; all became equal in the eyes of the conquerors, as soon as they no longer needed assistance. In the kingdom of Leinster, as elsewhere, they only left to the inhabitants of their land and property that which was not worth the taking from them. They who had called in the Normans and fought with them, repented and revolted;2 but wanting organization, they could not carry on their revolt, and the foreigners accused them of fickleness and perfidy. These interested reproaches passed into contemporary history, which at every page lavishes them upon all of Irish race.3

Towards the year 1177, the men of Connaught and Ulster, not content with defending the approaches to their own country, resolved to attempt the enfranchisement of the invaded territory. They advanced as far as Dublin; but, unskilled in the art of besieging, they did not succeed in gaining possession of this city, which had been recently fortified, and were thus arrested in their progress. The Normans, to compel them to retreat by a powerful diversion, entered Ulster, under the command of John de Courcy. This manœuvre obliged the king of Connaught to quit the south-eastern country, and to return northwards; many of the ancient chiefs, and even of the Irish bishops of the Anglo-Norman territory, joined his army.4

At this time a cardinal, named Vivian, who had been sent by the pope to Scotland to collect money, having succeeded in his mission, landed in the north of Ireland, in the district whither the war had just been transferred. Notwithstanding all the evil that the Roman church had inflicted upon Ireland, the legate was received with great honour by the chiefs of the Irish army; they intreated him, with deference, to counsel them, and to tell them whether it was not lawful for them to oppose with all their power the usurpation of the king of England. From fear or calculation, the pontifical legate gave them the reply they desired, and even exhorted them to fight to the death in defence of their country. This encouragement excited an universal joy and a warm friendship towards the cardinal, who, without losing any time, announced that he would make a collection for the church of Rome. In the fulness of their content, the chiefs of the army and the people gave as much as they could, and the legate, continuing his journey, entered the Anglo-Norman territory.

Arrived at Dublin, he was ill received by the king’s barons and justiciaries, who reproached him with having encouraged the Irish to resistance, and ordered him to depart forthwith, unless he chose publicly to retract what he had said. The cardinal, without hesitation, proclaimed king Henry II. sovereign and lawful master of Ireland, and, in the name of the church, fulminated a decree of excommunication against every native who did not acknowledge him. The Normans were as delighted at this sentence as their adversaries had been at the approbation bestowed on their patriotic devotion, and the legate filled his coffers at leisure throughout the conquered part of the island. He then went to visit the Norman army, which had just invaded Ulster. This army suffered greatly from a scarcity of provisions, because, at their approach, the inhabitants hid or burned their provisions, or stored them in the churches, to stay the pillage of the foreigners by the fear of sacrilege. If such scruples did not wholly check the soldiers, they, at least, produced in them a certain degree of moral restraint, which, added to their physical privations, delayed the progress of the campaign. The chief of the expedition, John de Courcy, asked the cardinal if they who fought for the rights of king Henry, could not, without sin, force open the doors of the churches and take the provisions from them? “In this case,” answered the accommodating Roman, “the Irish alone would be guilty of sacrilege, who, to sustain their rebellion, dare to transform the church of God into a granary and a storehouse.”1

The invasion of Ulster was successful, though incomplete: the maritime towns and low country fell into the hands of the foreigners; but the mountainous districts remained free, and the natives collected there, and carried on a guerilla warfare.2 While John de Courcy was fortifying himself in his new conquest, the Norman Mile or Milon, who styled himself Mile de Cogham, because he possessed an estate of that name in England, crossed the river Shannon with six hundred horse, and entered the province of Connaught. He was followed thither by Hugh de Lacy, who was accompanied by greater forces. On their approach, the inhabitants withdrew to the forests, driving their cattle before them, taking away all they could, and burning the rest, together with their houses. This system of defence would probably have succeeded, had not the king of Connaught, who hitherto had shown himself the bravest man in Ireland, requested to capitulate, and consented to acknowledge himself liegeman of the king of England.3 His defection weakened the spirit of his people; but the nature of their country, the most mountainous in the island, and intersected by lakes and marshes, prevented the Anglo-Normans from completely effecting its conquest. They obtained few lands there, and settled in but a limited number; the only bond of subjection by which they retained their authority over this part of Ireland being the oath of vassalage sworn by the chief who had become their friend.

Hugh de Lacy married one of the daughters of this chief, and his companions in victory, dispersed among the native population, married, like himself, women of the country.4 Whether from the tendency to imitation, natural to man, or from a politic desire to ingratiate themselves with the natives, they gradually quitted the manners and customs of the Normans for those of the Irish, having at their banquets a harper, and preferring music and poetry to tournaments and warlike jousts.5 This change greatly displeased the barons settled in the southern and eastern provinces, where the natives, reduced to servitude and held in contempt by their lords, inspired the latter with no desire to imitate them. They treated those who adopted the usages or married the women of the country, as degenerate and misallied, and the children born of these marriages were regarded as very inferior in nobility to those of pure Norman race. Moreover, they distrusted them, fearing least the tie of relationship should some day attach them to the cause of the conquered people; which, however, did not take place until many centuries after.

On the other hand, the king of England distrusted the lords settled in Ireland, alarmed at the idea that, sooner or later, one of them might undertake to found a new empire in that island. To avert this danger, Henry II. resolved to send one of his sons to represent him, under the title of king of Ireland; and, as he could not trust any of the three eldest, who were alone capable of properly fulfilling the mission, he selected John, the youngest of all, scarcely as yet fifteen.1 The day on which this prince received knighthood at Westminster, his father made all the conquerors of the isle of Erin swear to him the oath of vassalage. Hugh de Lacy and Mile de Cogham did homage to him for Connaught, and John de Courcy for Ulster. The south-western part of the island was not yet subjected: it was offered in fief to two brothers, Herbert and Josselin de la Pommeraye, upon the sole condition that they should conquer it; they refused the gift, which seemed to them too onerous. But Philip de Brause accepted it, and did homage for it to the new king of Ireland, declaring that he held of him, for the service of sixty men, a district into which no Norman had yet penetrated.2

The fourth son of Henry II. embarked in April 1185, and landed at Waterford, accompanied by Robert le Pauvre, his marshal, and a great number of young men, brought up at the court of England, who had never seen Ireland, and who, alike strangers to the conquerors of the country and to the natives, followed the new king, in the hope of making a rapid fortune at the expense of both. Upon landing, John proceeded to Dublin, where he was received with great ceremony by the archbishops and all the Anglo-Normans of the district. Many of the Irish chiefs who had sworn fealty to king Henry and to the foreign barons, came to salute the young prince, according to the form of their country.

This ceremonial was much less refined than that of the Norman court; it left each man free to give to the person invested with sovereign power, the token of affection he thought fit, and in the way he thought fit. The Irish had no idea but that they were to follow the ancient customs, and, accordingly, one simply bowed before the son of king Henry, another shook hands with him, a third wished to embrace him; but the Normans regarded this familiarity as impertinent, and treated the native chiefs as rude, unmannerly, untaught churls. Amusing themselves with insulting them, they pulled their long beards, or their hair, which hung down on each side of the head, or touched their dress with a contemptuous air, or pushed them towards the door. These insults did not remain unavenged, and the same day all the Irish chiefs left Dublin in a body. Many people of the surrounding districts, taking with them their children and their goods, followed them, and sought refuge, some in the south with the king of Limerick, who still struggled against the conquest; others with the king of Connaught, who soon placed himself at the head of a new patriotic insurrection.1

In the almost general war which then arose between the Irish and their conquerors, a circumstance favourable to the former was the jealousy of the young king’s courtiers towards the barons and knights of the conquest. Having nothing to lose in this war, they looked upon it as an occasion presented to them of supplanting the first settlers in their commands and their position. They accused and calumniated them to the son of Henry II., who, frivolous, careless, and devoted to the companions of his pleasures, despoiled in their favour the founders and supporters of the Norman power in Hibernia. He spent in debauchery all the money received from England for the payment of the troops; his army, ill commanded and discontented, obtained little success against the insurgents, and the cause of the conquerors began to be in danger. As soon as this peril was felt, the young king and his courtiers fled and quitted the island, taking with them all the money they could collect, and leaving the two populations really interested in the war, to fight it out between them.1

The struggle of these two races of men continued for a long period, under every form, in open country and in towns, by strength and by stratagem, by open attack and by assassination. The same spirit of hatred to the foreign power which, in England, had strewed with Norman corses the forests of Yorkshire and Northumberland, now filled with them the lakes and marshes of Erin. A feature giving a peculiar character to the conquest of the latter country is, that the conquerors of Ireland, ranking as oppressors in reference to the natives, were reduced to that of oppressed, in reference to their countrymen who had remained in England. The evil that the sons of the conquerors inflicted upon the subjugated nation, was in part retaliated upon them by the kings of whom they held, who, doubting their fidelity, regarded them almost as a foreign race. There was, however, infinite difference between the tyrannies which the English, established in Ireland, underwent from the government of England, and those which they themselves inflicted on the natives for a long series of ages. A document of the fourteenth century may answer the purpose of much detail, and complete, for the reader, the idea of a conquest in the middle ages.

“To pope John, Donald O’Neyl, king of Ulster, and the inferior kings of that territory, and all the population of Irish race.

“Most holy father, we transmit to you some exact and true information of the state of our nation and the injustice we suffer, and which our ancestors have suffered, from the kings of England, and their agents, and the English barons born in Ireland. After having driven us by violence from our spacious habitations, from our fields and our paternal inheritances; after having forced us, in order to save our lives, to fly to the mountains, the marshes, the woods, and the hollows of the rocks, they continually harass us in these miserable asylums to expel us thence, and appropriate the whole of our country to themselves. From this there results between them and us an implacable enmity; and it was a former pope who placed us in this deplorable situation. They had promised this pope to form the people of Hibernia to good manners, and to give them good laws: but far from so doing, they have destroyed all the written laws which heretofore governed us. They have left us without laws, the better to accomplish our ruin; or have established perfectly detestable laws, of which the following are examples.

“It is a rule in the courts of justice of the king of England in Ireland, that any man, not of Irish race, may bring any sort of action against an Irishman, while this power is prohibited to all Irishmen, lay or clerical. When, as too often happens, an Englishman assassinates an Irishman, priest or layman, the assassin is not corporally punished, or even made to pay a fine: on the contrary, the more considerable among us the assassinated man, the more is the murderer excused, honoured, and recompensed by his countrymen, even by the ecclesiastics and bishops. No Irishman may dispose of his property on his death-bed, but the English appropriate it all. All the religious orders established in Ireland upon the English territory are forbidden to receive any Irishman into their houses.

“The English, who have dwelt among us for many long years, and who are called men of mixed race, are not less cruel towards us than are the others. Sometimes they invite to their table the greatest men of our land, and treacherously kill them at board, or while they sleep. It is thus that Thomas de Clare, having invited to his house Brien the Red, of Thomond, his brother-in-law, put him to death by surprise, after having partaken with him of the same consecrated host, divided into two parts. These crimes they deem honourable and praiseworthy; it is the belief of all their laity, and many of their churchmen, that there is no more sin in killing an Irishman than in killing a dog. Their monks boldly assert that, for having killed a man of our nation (which too often happens), they would not abstain one single day from saying mass. As a proof of this, the monks of the order of Citeaux, established at Granard, in the diocese of Armagh, and those of the same order at Ynes, in Ulster, daily attack in arms, wound and kill the Irish, and yet regularly say mass. Brother Simon, of the order of Minorites, a relation of the bishop of Coventry, has publicly declared from the pulpit that there is not the slightest sin in killing or robbing an Irishman. In a word, all maintain that they are at full liberty to take from us, if they can, our lands and our goods, and their conscience does not reproach them for this, even at the hour of death.

“These grievances, added to the difference of language and of manners which exists between them and us, destroy every hope of our ever enjoying peace or truce in this world, so great on their side is the desire to rule, so great on ours the legitimate and natural desire to throw off an insupportable servitude, and to recover the inheritance of our ancestors. We preserve in our heart’s core an inveterate hatred, the result of long memories of injustice, of the murder of our fathers, our brothers, our cousins, which will never be forgotten, either by us or by our sons. Thus, then, without regret or remorse, so long as we shall live, we shall fight them in defence of our rights, ceasing only to combat and injure them when they themselves, through want of power, shall cease to do us evil, and when the Supreme Judge shall take vengeance on their crimes, which we firmly hope will happen sooner or later. Until then, we will, for the recovery of that independence which is our natural right, make war upon them to the death, constrained as we are thereto by necessity, and preferring to confront the peril as brave men than to languish amidst insult and outrage.”1

This promise of war to the death, made more than four hundred years ago, is not yet forgotten; and, melancholy circumstance, but well worthy to be remarked, blood has been shed in our own times, in Ireland, in the old quarrel of the conquest. The hour when this quarrel will be terminated, belongs to a future that we cannot as yet discern; for, notwithstanding the mixture of races, the intercommunion of every kind brought about by the course of centuries, hatred to the English government still subsists, as a native passion, in the mass of the Irish nation. Ever since the hour of invasion, this race of men has invariably desired that which their conquerors did not desire, detested that which they liked, and liked that which they detested. She whose misfortunes were in a degree caused by the ambition of the popes, attached herself to the doctrines of popery with a sort of fury, the instant that England emancipated herself from them. This indomitable pertinacy, this faculty of preserving through centuries of misery the remembrance of their lost liberty, and of never despairing of a cause always defeated, always fatal to those who have dared to defend it, is perhaps the strangest and the noblest example ever given by any nation.

Something of the tenacity of memory and of the national spirit which characterize the Irish race has been exhibited, at the same epochs, by the native Welsh. Weak as they were at the close of the twelfth century, they still hoped not only to recover the conquered portion of their own immediate country, but a return of the time when they possessed the island of Britain. Their immoveable confidence in this chimerical hope, made such an impression upon those who observed it, that in England, and even in France, the Welsh were considered to possess the gift of prophecy.1 The verses in which the ancient Cambrian poets had expressed, with effusion of soul, their patriotic wishes and expectations, were looked upon as mystic predictions, the exposition of which it was sought to discover in the great events of the day.2 Hence the singular celebrity which Myrdhin, a bard of the seventh century, enjoyed five hundred years after his death, under the name of Merlin the Enchanter. Hence also, the extraordinary renown of king Arthur, the hero of a petty nation, whose existence was scarcely known upon the continent. But the books of this petty nation were so full of poetry, they had so powerful an impress of enthusiasm and conviction, that once translated into other languages, they became most attractive reading for foreigners, and the theme upon which the romance writers of the middle ages most frequently constructed their fictions. It was thus that the old war-chief of the Cambrians appeared, in the fabulous histories of the Norman and French trouvères, the ideal of a perfect knight, and the greatest king that ever wore crown.

Not content to adorn this personage with every knightly perfection, many foreigners believed in his return, well nigh as firmly as did the Welsh themselves; this opinion gained ground even among the conquerors of Wales, whom it terrified despite all their efforts to conquer the impression; various reports, each more fantastic than the rest, nourished this belief. Now it was said that pilgrims, returning from the Holy Land, had met Arthur in Sicily, at the foot of Mount Etna;1 now, that he had appeared in a wood in Lower Brittany, or that the foresters of the king of England, in making their rounds by moonlight, often heard a great noise of horns, and met troops of hunters, who said they formed part of the train of king Arthur.2 Lastly, the tomb of king Arthur was nowhere to be found; it had often been sought but never discovered, and this circumstance scemed a confirmation of all the reports in circulation.3

The contemporary historians of the reign of king Henry II. admit that all these things formed for the Welsh a groundwork for national enthusiasm, and great encouragement in their resistance to foreign rule.4 The stronger minded among the Anglo-Normans ridiculed what they called the Breton Hope; but this hope, so vivid, so real, that it communicated itself by contagion even to the enemies of the Cambrians, gave umbrage to the statesmen of the court of England.5 To give it a mortal blow, they resolved to discover the tomb of Arthur, and this they did in the following manner. About the year 1189, a nephew of the king, named Henry de Sully, ruled the abbey of Glastonbury, raised on the site of the building whither popular tradition related that the great Cambrian chief had retired, to await the cure of his wounds. This abbot all at once announced, that a bard of Pembrokeshire had had a revelation as to the sepulchre of king Arthur; and hereupon extensive excavations were commenced within the walls of the monastery, care being taken the while to keep apart all persons who were likely to raise doubts on the subject.1 The desired discovery was of course made, and there was found, say the contemporaries, a Latin inscription engraved on a metal plate, and bones of an extraordinary size. These precious remains were raised with great marks of respect,2 and Henry II. had them placed in a magnificent coffin, of which he did not grudge the expense, thinking himself amply repaid by the injury done to the Welsh, in depriving them of their long cherished hope, of the superstition which animated their courage, and shook that of their conquerors.3

The patriotic determination of the Cambrians, however, survived the hope of king Arthur’s return, and they were still far from resigning themselves to foreign rule. This disposition of mind gave them confidence in themselves, so undoubting that it almost seemed to partake of insanity. In an expedition which king Henry II. made in person to the south of Wales, a Cambrian chief, under the influence of one of those family feuds which were the capital vice of the nation, came to his camp and joined him, The king received him as a valuable auxiliary, and questioning him on the probable chances of the war: “Dost thou think,” he said, “that the rebels can withstand my army?” At this question, patriotic pride awakened in the heart of the Welshman. Looking at the king with an air at once calm and assured, he answered: “King, your power may, to a certain extent, weaken and injure this nation, but utterly to destroy it requires the anger of God. In the day of judgment no other race, no other tongue than that of the Kymrys will answer for that corner of the earth to the Sovereign Judge.”4

The historians do not say in what terms Henry II. replied to these words, so impressed with imperturbable conviction; but the idea of the prophetic skill of the Welsh was not without power over him; at least, so his flatterers thought, for his name is found, by interpolation, in many of the old poems attributed to the bard Myrdhin.5

One day, as the same king, returning from Ireland, passed through Pembrokeshire, a countryman accosted him, to communicate an entirely religious prediction, remarkable only for the circumstances which accompanied it. The Welshman, thinking that a king of England must needs understand English, addressed Henry II. in that language, thus: “God holde ye, king.”1 This salutation was followed by an harangue of which the king understood but a few words; wishing to answer, and unable to do so, he said in French to his squire: “Ask this peasant if he is telling us his dreams.” The squire, whose less elevated position enabled him to converse with Saxons, served as an interpreter between his master and the Cambrian.2 Thus, to the fifth king of England since the Conquest, the English language was almost a foreign tongue. The son and successor of Henry II., Richard, upon whose reign our history now enters, could just as little converse in English; but then he spoke and wrote equally well the two Romane languages of Gaul, that of the north and that of the south, the tongue of oui and the tongue of oc.

The first administrative act of Richard I., when his father (as we have seen) was buried in the church of Fontevrault, was to arrest Stephen de Tours, seneschal of Anjou and treasurer of Henry II. He shut him up, chained hand and foot, in a dungeon, which he did not quit until he had given up to the new king all the deceased king’s money, and his own too.3 Richard then crossed the Channel, accompanied by his brother John, and, on his arrival in England, took the same precautions as on the continent; he hastened to the various royal treasuries in different cities, and had their contents collected, weighed and enumerated. The love of gold was the first passion manifested by the new monarch; and as soon as he had been consecrated and crowned, according to ancient custom, he began to sell everything he possessed, lands, castles, towns, his whole demesne, and in some places the domains of others, if we are to credit an historian of the time.4

Many rich Normans, priests and laymen, profited by the opportunity, and bought, at a cheap rate, portions of the large share of the conquest which William the Bastard had reserved for himself and his successors.1 The Saxon burgesses of many towns belonging to the king, clubbed together to purchase their houses, and to become, for an annual rent, proprietors of the place they inhabited.2 By the operation of such a compact or treaty, the town making it became a corporation, regulated by officers responsible to the king for the payment of the municipal debt, and to the citizens for the employment of the money raised by personal contributions. The reigns of the successors of Richard I. exhibit many of these conventions by which the cities of England gradually emerged from the condition to which the Norman Conquest had reduced them,3 and it is wholly probable that he himself used this mode of filling his coffers, at a time when he seemed to neglect no means of so doing. “I would sell London,” he said to his courtiers, “if I could find a purchaser.”4

The money thus accumulated by the king of England in the first months of his reign, seemed destined to the expenses of the expedition to the Holy Land, which he had sworn to accomplish in common with Philip of France. Yet Richard displayed little haste to set out; his companion in pilgrimage was obliged to send ambassadors to England to remind him of his plighted word, and to inform him that the time of departure was definitively fixed for the festival of Easter. Richard, seeing no excuse for further delay, convoked at London a general assembly of his earls and barons, at which all those who with him had made a vow to take up the cross, swore to be at the place of meeting without fail. The ambassadors took this oath upon the soul of the king of France, and the barons of England upon the soul of their own king. Vessels were collected at Dover, and Richard crossed the sea.5

Upon the point of departure for the new crusade, the kings of England and France made a compact of alliance and brotherhood-in-arms, swearing that each would maintain the life and honour of the other; that neither would fail the other in the hour of danger; that the king of France would defend the rights of the king of England, as he would his own city of Paris, and the king of England those of the other king, as he would those of his own city of Rouen. Richard sailed from one of the ports of southern Gaul, which, from the frontiers of Spain to the coast of Italy, between Nice and Venitimille, were all free, depending nominally on the crown of Arragon.1 King Philip, who had no maritime town on the Mediterranean, went to Genoa, and embarked in vessels furnished him by this rich and powerful city.2 The fleet of the king of England joined him by the Straits of Gibraltar; and the two kings, having coasted along Italy, took up their winter quarters in Sicily.3

This island, conquered a century before by the Norman lords of Apulia and Calabria, formed, with the opposite territory, a kingdom acknowledging the suzerainty of the holy see. In the year 1139, Roger, first king of Sicily and Naples, had received from pope Innocent II. investiture by the standard. After the reign of his son and that of his grandson, the crown fell to one of his natural sons, named Tancred, who had acceded shortly previous to the arrival of the two kings at Messina. Both were received with great marks of respect and friendship; Philip had lodgings provided for himself and his barons within the town; and Richard established himself outside the walls, in a house surrounded by a vineyard.

One day that he was walking in the environs of Messina, accompanied by a single knight, he heard the cry of a falcon in the house of a peasant. Falcons, like all other birds of chase, were at this time in England, and even in Normandy, noble property, prohibited to villeins and burghers, and reserved for the amusement of barons and knights. Richard, forgetting that in Sicily things were not exactly as they were in his own kingdom, entered the house, seized the bird, and was about to carry it away; but the Sicilian peasant, though the subject of a king of Norman race, was not accustomed to suffer what the English endured; he resisted, and, calling his neighbours to his aid, he drew his knife upon the king. Richard endeavoured to use his sword against the peasants who collected around him, but the weapon breaking in his hands, he was fain to flee, pursued with sticks and stones.1 Shortly after this adventure, the habit of going any length in England with the villeins and burghers, involved the king in a more serious affair. There was, near Messina, on the coast of the Straits, a monastery of Greek monks, which its position rendered very strong: Richard, thinking the building commodious for holding his stores, expelled the monks and placed a garrison in it. But the inhabitants of Messina, resolved to show the foreign prince how greatly this act of contemptuous arrogance towards them displeased them, closed their gates, and refused the king of England’s people admission to the city. On hearing this, Richard, furious with anger, hastened to the palace of Tancred, and required him to chastise, without delay, the citizens who had dared to oppose a king. Tancred commanded the Messinese to abstain from hostilities, and peace seemed re-established; but Sicilian vindictiveness did not subside at the dictate of political considerations. Some days after, a troop of the most indignant and bravest of the citizens of Messina assembled on the heights around the quarters of the king of England, for the purpose of assailing him unexpectedly when he should pass with a limited train. Weary of waiting, they attacked the house of a Norman officer, Hugh le Brun; there ensued a combat and a great tumult, which coming to the ears of Richard, who was then in conference with king Philip upon the affairs of the holy war, he hastened to arm himself and his people. With superior forces, he pursued the citizens to the gates of the town: the latter entered, but admission was refused to the Normans, upon whom there rained from the walls above, a shower of arrows and stones. Five knights and twenty sergeants of the king of England were killed; at length, his whole army coming up, broke down one of the gates, and, taking possession of the city, planted the banner of Normandy on all the towers.

During this combat, the king of France had remained a tranquil spectator, without, say the historians, offering any aid to his brother-in-pilgrimage; but when he saw the standard of the king of England floating on the ramparts of Messina, he demanded that this flag should be removed and replaced by his own. This was the commencement of a quarrel between the brothers-in-arms, which time only embittered. Richard would not yield to the pretensions of the king of France; but, lowering his banner, committed the city to the custody of the knights of the Temple until he obtained satisfaction from king Tancred for the conduct of the Messinese. The king of Sicily granted everything that was asked, and, more timid than a handful of his subjects had shown themselves, he made his great officers swear, by his soul and their own, that he and his people, by land and by sea, would at all times maintain faith and peace with the king of England and all his people.

In proof of his fidelity to this oath, Tancred gave Richard a letter, which he assured him had been sent to him by king Philip, and in which that monarch said that the king of England was a traitor, who had not observed the conditions of the last peace made with him, and that if Tancred and his people would fall upon him, by day or by night, the army of France would aid them. Richard kept this communication for some time secret; but in one of the frequent disputes resulting from their prolonged stay in the same place, he suddenly presented the letter to the king of France, and asked him if he recognised it? Without replying to this question, Philip assailed the king of England: “I see what it is,” said he; “you seek a quarrel with me, as a pretext for not marrying my sister Aliz, whom you have sworn to wed; but be sure that if you abandon her, and take another wife, I will be a life-long enemy of you and yours.” “I cannot marry your sister,” calmly answered Richard; “for it is certain that she had a child by my father; as I can prove by good testimony, if you so require.”1 This was not a discovery that Richard had only just made respecting his affianced bride; he had known of the affair at the time when, to injure his father, he showed as we have seen, so great a desire to conclude this marriage. But that which he had promised, ambitious to reign, he did not, as crowned king, deem himself bound to accomplish; and he made Philip undergo the proof, by evidence, of his sister’s shame. The facts, as it would seem, were incontestable; and the king of France, unable to persist in his demand, released Richard from his promise of marriage, in consideration of ten thousand marks of silver, payable in four years. On this condition, says the contemporary narrator, he gave him leave to marry whomsoever he pleased.1

Once more friends, the two kings set sail for the Holy Land, after having again sworn upon the relics and upon the Gospel, faithfully to sustain each other, going and returning. On the eve of departure, the following ordinance was published in the two camps:—

“Know that it is forbidden to every one in the army, except the knights and priests, to play for money at any game whatever, during the transit; the priests and knights may play so long as they lose no more than twenty sous in one day and night, and the kings may play for as much as they will.

“In the company of the kings, or in their ship, and with their permission, the royal sergeants-at-arms may play up to twenty sous; and so in the company of the archbishops, bishops, earls, counts, and barons, and with their permission, their sergeants may play to the same amount.

“But if, of their own authority, sergeants-at-arms, labourers or sailors, presume to play, the former shall be flogged once a day for three days; and the latter shall be plunged three times into the sea, from the top-mast.”2

God, say the historians of the time, blessed the holy pilgrimage of these pious and sage kings. Philip arrived first off the city of Ptolemais or Saint Jean-d’Acre, then besieged by the Christians whom Salah-Edin had driven from Jerusalem and Palestine; Richard joined him here after a long delay, during which he had conquered the island of Cyprus from a prince of the race of Comnena. As soon as the two kings had united their forces, the siege of Acre advanced rapidly; their heavy guns, their pierriers, their mangonneaux, and their trebuchets did such execution upon the walls, that a breach was opened in a few days, and the garrison obliged to capitulate.3 This victory, which produced the most vivid enthusiasm among the Christians of the east, did not, however, assure concord between the crusader princes. Despite the oath taken by the two kings upon the Gospel, they and their soldiers hated and abused and calumniated each other inveterately.1

Most of the chiefs of the army, whatever their rank or their country, were divided by rivalries, ambition, avarice, or pride. On the day of the taking of Acre, the king of England, finding the banner of the duke of Austria planted on the walls beside his own, had it taken down, torn, and thrown into a sewer.2 Shortly after, the marquis of Montferrat, who disputed with Guy de Lusignan the vain title of king of Jerusalem, was assassinated at Tyre by two fanatic Arabs, and the king of England was charged with having hired them to do the deed. Lastly, a few months afterwards, the king of France falling ill, thought, or feigned to think, that he had been poisoned by some secret agent of the king of England.3 Under this pretext he abandoned the enterprise he had vowed to achieve, and left his companions in pilgrimage to fight alone against the Saracens.4 Richard, more obstinate than he, continued with every effort the difficult task of reconquering the holy city and the wood of the true cross.

While performing, with little result, exploits that rendered his name an object of terror throughout the east, his kingdom of England was the theatre of great troubles caused by his absence. The native English had not, indeed, essayed a revolt against their lords of Norman race; but misunderstandings had arisen among the latter. On his departure for the crusade, king Richard had confided no authority to his brother John, who then bore no other title than that of earl of Mortain. Faithful to that old instinct of discord which he himself ascribed to all the members of his family, Richard distrusted and disliked his brother. A stranger to the family, a stranger even to Anjou and to Normandy, William de Longchamp, bishop of Ely, a native of Beauvais, had been charged by the king with the supreme direction of affairs, under the title of chancellor and grand justiciary of England. Lastly, king Richard had made his natural brother Geoffroy swear that he would not set foot in England until three years after his departure, his expectation being that he should return within that time.1

The chancellor, William de Longchamp, master of the entire royal power, used it to enrich himself and his family; he placed his relations and friends of foreign birth in all the posts of profit and honour; confided to them the custody of the castles and towns, which he took, under various pretences, from men of pure Norman race, whom, equally with the English he made to feel the weight of insupportable exactions.2 The authors of the time say that, thanks to his rapine, no knight could keep his silver-plated baldric, no noble his gold ring, no woman her necklace, no Jew his merchandize.3 He affected the manners of a sovereign, and sealed the public acts with his own seal, instead of with the seal of England;4 a numerous guard was posted round his palace; wherever he went, a thousand horse and more accompanied him, and if he lodged in any man’s house, three years’ income did not suffice to repair the expense he and his train had occasioned in one single day.5 He procured at great expense from France, trouveres and jongleurs to sing in the public squares, verses wherein it was affirmed that the chancellor had not his equal in the world.6

John, earl of Mortain, the king’s brother, a man no less ambitious and no less vain than the chancellor, beheld with envy this power and pomp, which he would fain himself have displayed. All whom the exactions of William de Longchamp angered, or who desired a political change wherein to make their fortune, formed a party around the earl, and an open struggle was soon established between the two rivals. Their enmity broke forth in reference to one Gerard de Camville, a man of Norman race, whom the chancellor sought to deprive of the governorship, or, as it was then called, the viscounty of Lincoln, which the king had sold to him.7 The chancellor, who wished to give this office to one of his friends, ordered Gerard to surrender the keys of the royal castle of Lincoln; but the viscount resisted the order, declaring that he was liegeman of the earl John, and that he would not give up his fief, until he had been judged and condemned to forfeiture in the court of his lord.1 On this refusal, the chancellor came with an army to besiege the castle of Lincoln, took it, and expelled Gerard de Camville, who demanded reparation for this violence from John, as his suzerain and protector. As a sort of reprisal for the injury done to his vassal, earl John seized upon the royal castles of Nottingham and Tickhil, placed his knights there, and unfurled his banner, protesting, says an ancient historian, that if the chancellor did not promptly do justice to Gerard, his liegeman, he would visit him with a rod of iron.2 The chancellor was alarmed, and negotiated an accommodation, by which the earl remained in possession of the two fortresses he had seized upon; this first step of prince John towards the authority his brother had feared to confide in him, was soon followed by more important attempts.

Geoffroy, the natural son of Henry II., who had been elected archbishop of York during his father’s life, but had long remained without confirmation by the pope, at length obtained from Rome permission to receive consecration from the prelate of Tours, the metropolitan of Anjou. Immediately after his consecration he departed for England, notwithstanding the oath which the king his brother had obliged him to take. The chancellor received information of this; and as the archbishop was about to sail from the port of Wissant, messengers came to him, and forbad him, in the king’s name, to cross the sea. Geoffroy took no heed to this prohibition, and armed men were posted to seize him on landing. Having evaded them by disguising himself, he reached a monastery at Canterbury, the monks of which received him, and concealed him in their house. But the rumour of his presence there soon spread; the monastery was invested by soldiers, and the archbishop, seized in the church as he was saying mass, was imprisoned in the castle of the city, under the charge of the constable Matthew de Clare. This violent arrest created great excitement throughout England; and earl John, availing himself of the occasion, openly took up his brother’s cause, and menacingly ordered the chancellor to set the archbishop at liberty. The chancellor did not venture to resist; and, becoming more daring, the earl of Mortain proceeded to London, convoked the great council of barons and bishops, and charged William de Longchamp before them with having enormously abused the power which the king had confided to him. William had displeased so many persons, that his accuser was sure of a favourable audience. The assembly of barons cited him to appear before them; he refused, and, assembling troops, marched from Windsor, where he then was, to London, to prevent the barons from assembling a second time. But the earl’s troops met him at the gates of the city, attacked and dispersed his escort, and forced him to throw himself, in great haste, into the Tower of London, where he remained close shut up, while the barons and bishops, assembled in parliament, deliberated on his fate.1

The majority of them resolved to strike a decisive blow, and to remove the man to whom king Richard had confided the viceroyalty, and who, according to legal forms, could not be deposed without the express order of the sovereign. In this daring enterprise, the earl of Mortain and the Anglo-Norman barons resolved to involve the Saxon inhabitants of London, in order to secure, if it became necessary to fight, the aid of that great city’s population. On the day fixed for their assembly, they rang the great alarm bell; and as the citizens issued from their houses, persons stationed in various places told them to go to Saint Paul’s church.2 The traders and artisans went thither in crowds to see what was on foot; they were surprised to find assembled there the nobles of the land, the sons of the men of the conquest, with whom they had no other relations than those of villein and lord. Contrary to their usual practices, the barons and prelates gave a cordial reception to the citizens, and a sort of transient fraternity appeared, despite the difference of social condition, between the Normans and Saxons. The latter understood as much as they could of the harangues pronounced before them in the French language; and, the debate over, there was read a letter purporting to be from the king, dated at Messina, and setting forth that if the chancellor conducted himself ill in his office, he might be deposed, and the archbishop of Rouen substituted for him. This having been read, the votes of the whole assembly were taken without distinction of race; and the Norman heralds proclaimed, “that it had pleased John, earl of Mortain, the king’s brother, all the bishops, earls, and barons of the kingdom, and the citizens of London, to depose from his office the chancellor, William de Longchamp.”1

Meantime the chancellor was close shut up in the Tower of London; he might have sustained a siege there; but, abandoning every thought of defence, he offered to capitulate. Egress was granted him, on condition of his surrendering to the archbishop of Rouen, his successor, the keys of all the king’s castles. He was made to swear not to quit England until he had made this surrender, and his two brothers were imprisoned as hostages for his word. He withdrew to Canterbury, and after staying there some days, resolved to flee, preferring to leave his brothers in danger of their lives than to restore the castles, by the possession of which he hoped to regain all he had lost. He left the town on foot and disguised, having over his male attire a woman’s petticoat and a cape with large sleeves; his head was covered with a veil of thick cloth, and he held a roll of cloth under his arm, and a measure in his hand. In this guise, that of the female English traders of the period, the chancellor went to the sea-coast, where he had to await for some time the vessel he had engaged to convey him abroad.2

He sat down tranquilly on a stone, with his bundle on his knees; some passing fishermen’s wives accosted him, asking the price of his cloth; but not knowing a word of English, the chancellor made no answer, which greatly surprised the women. They went on, however; but other women came up, saw the cloth, and examining it, asked the same question as their predecessors. The pretended trader continuing silent, the women repeated their question; at length, driven to extremity, the chancellor laughed aloud, thinking by such an answer to escape from his embarrassment. At this illtimed mirth the women thought they were addressing an idiot or a mad woman, and raising his veil for further examination, discovered the face of a dark-complexioned man, recently shaved. Their cries of surprise aroused the workmen of the port, who, delighted with an object of diversion, threw themselves on the disguised person, dragged him about by his clothes, threw him down, and amused themselves with his futile efforts to escape from them or to make them understand who he was. Having dragged him for some time over the stones and mud, the fishermen and sailors ended by shutting him up in a cellar, which he only quitted upon making himself known to the agents of the Norman authority.1

Obliged to fulfil his engagements with the earl of Mortain and his partisans, the ex-chancellor gave up to them the keys of the castles, and thus obtained permission freely to leave England. On his arrival in France, he hastened to write word to king Richard that his brother John had seized upon all his fortresses, and would usurp his kingdom if he did not forthwith return.2 Other news, still more alarming, soon reached the king of England in Palestine. He learned that Philip of France, passing through Rome, had induced the pope to release him from the oath of peace he had sworn to Richard, and that, on his arrival at Fontainebleau, he had boasted that he would soon disturb the states of the king of England.3 Notwithstanding the distance which now separated him from Richard, king Philip still affected to fear some treachery or snare on his part.4 Once, on arriving at the castle of Pontoise for recreation, he suddenly appeared anxious, and hastily returned to Paris. He immediately assembled his barons, and showed them letters just arrived, he said, from beyond seas, and which warned him to be on his guard, for that the king of England had, from the east, sent hassassis or assassins to kill him.5

Such was the name, then quite new in European languages, by which were designated certain Mahometans, fanatics in religion and patriotism, who thought to gain Paradise by devoting themselves to kill by surprise the enemies of their faith. It was generally believed that there existed in the defiles of Mount Libanus a whole tribe of these enthusiasts, subject to a chief called the “Old Man of the Mountain,” and that the vassals of this mysterious personage joyfully ran to meet death at the first signal from their chief.1 The name of Haschischi, by which he was designated in Arabic, was derived from that of an intoxicating plant, of which they made frequent use to exalt or stupify themselves.2

It will be readily understood, that the name of these men who poniarded people without the slightest warning of their attack, stabbed generals of armies in the very midst of their soldiers, and who, so they had struck their victim, themselves died laughing, necessarily inspired the western crusaders and pilgrims with great alarm. They brought back so vivid a memory of the terror they had felt at the mere word assassin, that this word soon passed into every mouth, and the most absurd tales of assassination readily found in Europe people disposed to credit them. This disposition existed, it would appear, in France, when king Philip assembled his barons in parliament at Paris. None of them expressed a doubt as to the king’s danger; and Philip, whether the more to excite hatred among his vassals against the king of England, or to give himself greater security against his other enemies and against his subjects themselves, surrounded his person with extraordinary precautions.3 “Contrary to the custom of his ancestors,” say the contemporary writers, “he was always escorted by armed men, and instituted, for more security, guards of his body, selected from among the men most devoted to him, and armed with great maces of iron or brass.” It is mentioned, that some persons, who, with their previously accustomed familiarity, approached him too near, ran great risk of their lives. “This royal innovation astonished and singularly displeased many.”4

The ill effect produced by the institution of these bodyguards, then called sergents à masses, obliged king Philip again to convoke the assembly of the barons and bishops of France.5 He renewed before them his former imputations against the king of England, assuring them that it was he who had caused the marquis of Montferrat to be killed at Tyre, in broad daylight, by assassins in his pay.1 “Is it then astonishing,” asked the king, “that I should take more care of myself than usual? nevertheless, if my precautions seem to you unbefitting or superfluous, say so, and I will discontinue them.”2

The assembly of course answered, that whatever the king thought fit to do for his personal safety was proper and just; the body-guards were maintained, and the institution existed many centuries after the belief in the mysterious power of the Old Man of the Mountain had disappeared from France.3 Another question addressed by king Philip to his barons was this: “Tell me, is it not fitting and lawful that I take prompt and full vengeance for the manifest injuries this traitor, Richard, has done me?” Upon this point the reply was still more unanimous, for the barons of France were all animated with the old spirit of national rancour against the Norman power.4

Notwithstanding the distance which then separated him from France, king Richard was quickly informed of these matters, because, in the fervour of zeal excited in Europe against the followers of Mahomet, new pilgrims departed every day for the Holy Land. The deposition of the chancellor, and the occupation of the fortresses by earl John, had greatly disturbed the king of England, who foresaw that, sooner or later, his brother, following the example he himself had given, would unite his projects of ambition with the projects of hostility of the king of France. These fears troubled him to such a degree, that, despite the vow he had taken not to quit the Holy Land, so long as there remained an ass for him to eat,5 he concluded a truce of three years, three months, and three days, with the Saracens, and departed for the west.

Arrived off Sicily, he thought it might be dangerous for him to land in one of the ports of southern Gaul, because most of the seigneurs of Provence were relations of the marquis of Montferrat, and because the count of Toulouse, Raymond de Saint Gilles, suzerain of the maritime districts west of the Rhone, was his personal enemy. Apprehending some ambush on their part, instead of traversing the Mediterranean, he entered the Adriatic, having dismissed most of his suite in order to avoid recognition. His vessel was attacked by pirates, whose friendship, after a vigorous skirmish with them, he conciliated; and leaving his own vessel for one of theirs, was conveyed in it to a little port on the coast of Istria. He landed with a Norman baron, named Baldwin de Bethune, his chaplains maître Philip and maître Anselme, some Templars, and a few servants. It was necessary to obtain a passport from the seigneur of the province, who resided at Goritz, and who, by an unfortunate chance, was nearly related to the family of the marquis of Montferrat. The king sent one of his people to seek the safe conduct required, ordering him to present to the count of Goritz a ring, set with a large ruby, which he had bought in Palestine of a Pisan merchant. This ruby, already celebrated, was recognised by the count. “Who are they who send thee to ask this permission?” said he to the messenger. “Pilgrims returning from Jerusalem.” “Their names?” “One is Baldwin de Bethune, and the other Hugh le Marchand, who offers you this ring.” The count of Goritz, examining the ring attentively, remained for some time silent; he then said: “Thou sayest not true; his name is not Hugh; he is king Richard. But since he designed to honour me unknown with a gift, I will not arrest him; I return him his present, and leave him free to proceed on his way.”

Surprised at this incident, which he had by no means anticipated, Richard immediately departed; no attempt was made to stay him. But the count of Goritz sent to inform his brother, the lord of a town at no great distance, that the king of England was in the country, and would pass through his lands. This brother had in his service a Norman knight, named Roger d’Argenton, whom he directed to visit every day all the inns where pilgrims lodged, and to see if he could not discover the king of England by his language, or any other token; promising him, if he succeeded in arresting him, the government of half his town. The Norman knight prosecuted his inquiries for several days, going from house to house, and at last discovered the king. Richard endeavoured to conceal who he was, but, driven to extremity by the Norman’s questions, he was fain to avow himself. Hereupon, Roger, with tears, implored him to flee forthwith, offering him his best horse; he then returned to his lord, told him that the news of the king’s arrival was a false report, and that he had not found him, but only Baldwin de Bethune, a countryman of his, who was returning from the great pilgrimage. The count, furious at having missed his aim, arrested Baldwin, and threw him into prison.

Meantime, king Richard was pursuing his flight on the German territory, his only companions being William de l’Etang, his intimate friend, and a valet, who spoke the Teutonic language, either from being an Englishman by birth, or because his inferior condition had permitted him to acquire the English language, at that time closely resembling the Saxon dialect of Germany, and altogether without French words, French expressions, or French constructions. Having travelled three days and three nights without taking any nourishment, almost without knowing whither they were going, they entered the province which in the Teutonic language was called Œster-reich, that is to say, country or the East. This name was a last reminiscence of the old empire of the Franks, of which this country had formed the eastern extremity. Œster-reich, or Autriche, as the French and Normans called it, was a dependent of the Germanic empire, and was governed by a lord who bore the title of here-zog, or duke; and, unfortunately, this duke, named Leotpolde, or Leopold,1 was the same whom Richard had mortally offended in Palestine by tearing down and dishonouring his banner. His residence was at Vienna on the Danube, where the king and his two companions arrived, exhausted with hunger and fatigue.

The servant who spoke English went to the exchange to convert gold besants into the money of the country. He made a great parade of his person and his gold, assuming an air of importance and the manners of a courtier. The citizens, conceiving suspicions, took him before their magistrate to ascertain who he was. He represented himself as the domestic of a rich merchant who was to arrive in three days, and was hereupon set at liberty. On his return to the king’s lodging, he related his adventure, and advised him to depart at once, but Richard, desiring repose, remained. Meantime the news of his landing reached Austria; and duke Leopold, eager for revenge, and still more so to enrich himself by the ransom of such a prisoner, sent spies and soldiers in every direction in search of him. They traversed the country without discovering him; but one day the same servant who had once before been arrested, being in the market-place purchasing provisions, a pair of his master’s richly-embroidered gloves, such as the nobles of the period wore with their court attire, were seen in his belt. He was again seized, and put to the torture to extract an avowal; he confessed the facts, and named the inn where king Richard was to be found. The house was immediately surrounded by the duke of Austria’s troops, who, surprising the king, forced him to surrender. The duke treated him with respect, but shut him up in a prison, where chosen soldiers guarded him, with drawn swords, night and day.1

As soon as the report of the king of England’s arrest got abroad, the emperor or Cæsar of all Germany, Henry VI., summoned the duke of Austria, his vassal, to transfer the prisoner to him, alleging that an emperor alone ought to keep a king in prison. Duke Leopold submitted with seeming good grace to this singular reasoning, stipulating, however, for at least a portion of the ransom. The king of England was then removed from Vienna to one of the imperial fortresses on the banks of the Rhine; and the delighted emperor sent to the king of France a message, more agreeable to him, says an historian of the time, than a present of gold and jewels. Philip immediately wrote to the emperor, congratulating him on his prize, advising him to preserve it carefully, because, he said, there would be no peace in the world if such a firebrand got loose, and, lastly, offering to pay a sum equal to, or even exceeding, the ransom of the king of England, if the emperor would transfer his captive to him.2

The emperor, as was the custom, submitted this proposition to the diet or general assembly of the lords and bishops of Germany. He set forth Philip’s propositions, and justified the imprisonment of Richard by the pretended crime of murder committed on the marquis of Montferrat, the insult offered to the banner of the duke of Austria, and the truce of three years concluded with the Saracens. For these misdeeds, the king of England, he said, ought to be declared the capital enemy of the empire.1 The assembly decided that Richard should be tried by it for the offences imputed to him; but it refused to deliver Richard to the king of France.2 The latter did not await the prisoner’s trial to send an express message to him, that he renounced him for his vassal, defied him, and declared war against him.3 At the same time he made to the earl of Mortain the same offers he had formerly made to Richard when exciting him against his father. He promised to guarantee to earl John the possession of Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine, and to aid him to obtain the crown of England; he only asked him in return to be faithfully his ally, and to marry the unfortunate Aliz.4 Without concluding any positive alliance with king Philip, John commenced intriguing with all the countries subject to his brother; and, under pretext that Richard was dead, or ought to be regarded as such, he demanded the oath of fealty from the public officers, and from the governors of the castles and towns.5

The king of England was informed of these machinations by several Norman abbots, who obtained permission to visit him in his prison, and especially by his former chancellor, William de Longchamp, the personal enemy of the earl of Mortain.6 Richard received him as a friend persecuted in his service, and employed him in various negotiations. The day fixed for the king’s trial arrived; he appeared as a prisoner before the Germanic diet assembled at Worms; to be absolved on every point, he had only to promise an hundred thousand marks of silver, and to acknowledge himself vassal of the emperor.7 This admission of vassalage, which was nothing more than a simple formality, derived importance in the eyes of the emperor from his pretensions to the universal domination of the Cæsars of Rome, whose heir he pretended to be. The feudal subjection of the kingdom of England to the German empire was not of a nature to have any protracted duration, yet its admission and declaration were made with all the pomp and ceremony required by the customs of the period. “King Richard,” says a contemporary, “divested himself of the kingdom, and remitted it to the emperor, as to the universal suzerain, investing him with it by his hood, and the emperor returned it him, to hold it in fief, on the condition of an annual subsidy of five thousand pounds sterling, and invested him with it by a double cross of gold.”1 After this ceremony, the emperor, bishops, and lords of Germany, promised by oath, upon their soul, that the king of England should be set at liberty as soon as he had paid an hundred thousand silver marks; and from that day Richard was less strictly confined.2

Meantime, the earl of Mortain, pursuing his intrigues and machinations, solicited the justiciaries of England, the archbishop of Rouen, and the barons of Normandy, to swear fealty to him, and to acknowledge him as king. The majority refused; and the earl, knowing himself too weak to compel them to his wish, crossed over to France, and concluded a formal treaty with king Philip. He declared himself vassal and liegeman of this monarch for England and all the other states of his brother, swore to marry his sister, and to resign to him a considerable part of Normandy, Tours, Loches, Amboise, and Montrichard, whenever, by his aid, he should become king of England.3 Lastly, he subscribed this clause: “And if my brother Richard were to offer me peace, I would not accept it without the consent of my ally of France, even though my ally were to make peace on his own account with my said brother Richard.”4

Upon the conclusion of this treaty, king Philip passed the frontiers of Normandy with a numerous army, and earl John distributed gold among the Welsh tribes who were still free, in order to induce them to assist, by an invasion, the machinations of his partisans in England.5

This people, oppressed by the Normans, joyfully placed their national hatred at the service of one of the two factions which dilacerated their enemy; but, incapable of great efforts beyond the little country where they so obstinately defended their independence, they were of little use to the adversaries of king Richard. Nor did these obtain much success elsewhere in England, so that earl John determined to take up his abode for awhile with the king of France, and to direct all his attention upon Normandy. But though thus freed from the scourge of war, England was none the happier, for she was subjected to enormous tributes, levied for the king’s ransom. The royal collectors overran the country in every direction, making every class of men contribute, priests and laymen, Saxons and Normans. All the sums levied in the provinces were brought to London; it had been calculated that the total amount would constitute the sum required for the ransom; but an enormous deficiency was found, occasioned by the peculation of the collectors. This first collection accordingly being insufficient, the royal officers commenced another, covering, say the historians, under the plausible name of the king’s ransom, their own shameful rapine.1

Richard had been nearly two years in prison; he was tired of his captivity, and sent message after message to his officers and friends in England, and on the continent, urging them to deliver him by paying his ransom.2 He complained bitterly of being neglected by his people, and of their not doing for him what he would have done for them. He made his plaint in a song composed in the southern Romane language, an idiom he preferred to the less polished dialect of Normandy, Anjou, and France.

“I have many friends, but they give meagrely: shame to them, that for want of ransom, I have been a prisoner two winters.”3

“Let my men and my barons, English, Normans, Poitevins, and Gascons, know that no companion of mine, were he ever so poor, would I leave in prison for the sake of gold. I say not this in reproach; but I am still a prisoner!—”

While the second collection for the king’s ransom was being made throughout England, officers of the emperor came to London, to receive, as part payment, the money which had been already got together.1 They tested the quality and verified the weight, and affixed their seals on the bags containing it, which were then conveyed by English sailors to Germany, at the risk and responsibility of the king of England.2 On receiving the money, the Cæsar of Germany sent one-third of it to the duke of Austria, as his share of the prize.3 A new diet was then assembled to decide on the fate of the prisoner, whose release was fixed for the third week after Christmas, on condition of his leaving a certain number of hostages as security for the payment of the balance remaining due.4

King Richard consented to anything and everything, and the emperor, delighted with his facility, determined to make him a present in return. By a formal charter he granted him, to hold in fief, several provinces over which he himself had but a disputed pretension; the Viennois and part of Burgundy, and the towns and territories of Lyons, Arles, Marseilles, and Narbonne. “Now it should be known,” says a contemporary, “that these territories given to the king by the emperor, contain five archbishoprics, and thirty-three bishoprics, but it must also be known that the said emperor has never been able to exercise any sort of authority over them, and the inhabitants have never acknowledged any lord nominated or presented by him.”5

When the king of France, and earl John, his ally, learned the resolution passed in the imperial diet, they feared they should not have time to execute their design before the king’s release. They accordingly sent messengers in all haste to the emperor, offering him seventy thousand marks of silver, if he would prolong, if but for a year, the imprisonment of Richard, or if he preferred it, one thousand marks of silver for each extended month of captivity, or an hundred and fifty thousand marks, if he would transfer the prisoner to the custody of the king of France and the earl. Tempted by these brilliant offers, the emperor was inclined to break his word, but the members of the diet, who had sworn to keep it faithfully, opposed his views, and exercising the power vested in them, set the captive at liberty about the end of January 1194.1 Richard could not proceed either to France, or to Normandy, at that time invaded by the French; the safest course for him was to embark from some German port, and sail direct to England. But it was now the season of storms; he was necessitated to wait more than a month at Antwerp, and meantime the emperor was again tempted by avarice; the hope of doubling his profits overruled the fear of displeasing chiefs less powerful than himself, and whom, as lord paramount, he had a thousand ways of reducing to silence. He resolved a second time to seize the prisoner, whom he had allowed to depart; but this treacherous design becoming known, one of the hostages who had remained with the emperor found means to warn the king. Richard immediately embarked in the galiot of a Norman merchant, named Alain Tranchemer; and having thus escaped the soldiers sent to arrest him, landed safely at Sandwich.2

Received with great demonstrations of joy, he found the majority of the Anglo-Norman earls and barons devoted to his cause. But just before, the great council or parliament of the kingdom had declared the earl of Mortain a public enemy, and had ordered that all his lands should be confiscated, and all his castles besieged. At the time of the king’s arrival, this order was being executed, and, in all the churches, sentence of excommunication was being pronounced against the earl and his adherents, in the name of the archbishops and bishops, amid the ringing of bells and the glare of tapers. The news of the arrival of Cœur-de-Lion (so the Normans surnamed king Richard,) terminated the resistance of the garrisons that still held for earl John. All surrendered, except that of Nottingham, which would not credit the report; the irritated king, prompt in his anger, marched to this town to besiege it in person, even before entering London.3

His presence in the camp before Nottingham was announced to the garrison by an unwonted flourish of trumpets, horns, clarions, and other instruments of military music; but, deeming it a stratagem of the besiegers, they persevered in their resistance. The king, denouncing a terrible punishment upon them, assaulted the town and took it; but the garrison retired into the castle, one of the strongest that the Normans had built in England. Before battering the walls with his great guns and war-machines, Richard had a gibbet raised, high as a tall tree, and had hanged upon it, in sight of the garrison, several men who had been taken in the first assault. This spectacle seemed to the besiegers a more certain indication of the king’s presence than any they had before observed, and they surrendered at discretion.1

After his victory, king Richard, by way of recreation, made a pleasure journey into the greatest forest of England, which stretched from Nottingham to the centre of Yorkshire, over a space of several hundred miles; the Saxons called it Sire-Wode, a name changed, in the lapse of centuries, to that of Sherwood. “Never before in his life had he seen these forests,” says a contemporary narrator, “and they pleased him greatly.”2 On quitting a long captivity, the mind is ever vividly sensible to the charms of picturesque scenery; and, moreover, with this natural attraction was probably combined another, appealing still more powerfully, perhaps, to the adventurous spirit of Richard Cœur-de-Lion. Sherwood was at this time a forest formidable to the Normans; it was the dwelling of the last remains of the bands of armed Saxons who, still abnegating the conquest, persisted in withdrawing from the law of the foreigner. Everywhere hunted, pursued, tracked like wild beasts, it was here only that, favoured by the locality, they had been able to maintain themselves in any number, under a sort of military organization, which gave them a more respectable character than that of mere highwaymen.

At about the time that the hero of the Anglo-Norman baronage visited Sherwood forest,3 there lived in that forest a man who was the hero of the serfs, of the poor and of the low—in a word, of the Anglo-Saxon race. “At this time,” says an ancient chronicler, “there arose among the disinherited, the most famous robber, Robert Hode, with his accomplices, whom the stolid vulgar celebrate in games and sports at their junketings, and whose history, sung by the minstrels, delights them more than any other.”1 In these few words are comprised all our historical data as to the existence of the last Englishman who followed the example of Hereward; to find any traces of his life and character, it is to the old romances and popular ballads that we must of necessity resort. If we cannot place faith in all the singular and often contradictory incidents related in these poems, they are, at least, incontestable evidence of the ardent friendship of the English nation for the outlaw-chief whom they celebrate, and for his companions, who, instead of labouring for masters, “ranged the forest merry and free,” as the old burthens express it.2

It cannot be doubted that Robert, or, more commonly, Robin Hood, was of Saxon origin; his French Christian name proves nothing against this opinion, for with the second generation after the conquest, the influence of the Norman clergy had, in a great degree, superseded the former baptismal names of England by the names of saints and others used in Normandy. The name of Hood, or Hode, is Saxon, and the ballads most ancient in point of date, and consequently the most worthy of attention, place the ancestors of him who bore it in the class of peasants.3 Afterwards, when the recollection of the revolution effected by the conquest had become less vivid, the imagination of the rustic poets embellished their favourite personage with the pomp of grandeur and riches: they made him an earl, or at least the grandson of an earl, whose daughter, having been seduced, fled, and gave birth to the hero, in a wood. This theory formed the subject of a popular romance, full of interest and of graceful conceptions; but the supposition itself rests on no probable authority.4

Whether or no Robin Hood was born, as the ballad relates—

• “Amang the leaves sae green,”

it was certainly in the woods that he passed his life, at the head of several hundred archers, formidable to the earls, viscounts, bishops, and rich abbots of England, but beloved by the farmers, labourers, widows, and poor people. These “merry men” granted peace and protection to all who were feeble and oppressed, shared with those who had nothing the spoils of those who fattened on other men’s harvests, and, according to the old tradition, did good to the honest and industrious.1 Robin Hood was the boldest and most skilful archer of the band; and after him was cited Little John, his lieutenant and brother-in-arms, inseparable from him in danger and in pastime, and equally so in the old English ballads and sayings. Tradition also names several others of his companions—Mutch, the miller’s son, old Scathlocke, and a monk, called Friar Tuck, who fought in frock and cowl, and whose only weapon was a heavy quarter-staff. They were all of a joyous humour, not seeking to enrich themselves, but simply to live on their booty, and distributing all they did not actually need themselves among the families dispossessed in the great pillage of the conquest. Though enemies of the rich and powerful, they did not slay those who fell into their hands, shedding blood only in their own defence.2 Their attacks fell chiefly on the agents of royal authority and on the governors of towns or provinces, whom the Normans called viscounts, and the English sheriffs.

• “But bend your bows, and strok your strings,
• Set the gallow-tree about;
• And Christ’s curse on his head, said Robin,
• That spares the sheriff and the sergeant!”3

The sheriff of Nottingham was the person against whom Robin Hood had the oftenest to contend, and who hunted him most closely, on horseback and on foot, setting a price on his head, and exciting his companions and friends to betray him. But none betrayed him, while many aided him to escape the dangers in which his daring often involved him.4

“I would rather die,” said an old woman to him one day, “I would rather die than not do all I might to save thee; for who fed and clothed me and mine, but thou and Little John?”1

The astonishing adventures of this bandit chief of the twelfth century, his victories over the men of Norman race, his stratagems and his escapes, were long the only national history that a man of the people in England transmitted to his sons, having himself received it from his ancestors. Popular imagination adorned the person of Robin Hood with all the qualities and all the virtues of the middle ages. He is described as alike devout in church and brave in combat; and it is said of him that once within a church for the purpose of hearing the service, whatever danger presented itself, he would not depart until the close.2 This scrupulous devotion exposed him more than once to the danger of being taken by the sheriff and his men; but he always found means of effectual resistance, and instead of being taken by the sheriff himself, it would seem, from the old story, somewhat liable, indeed, to a suspicion of exaggeration, that he himself took prisoner the sheriff.3 Upon this theme, the English minstrels of the fourteenth century composed a long ballad, of which some verses merit quotation, if only as examples of the fresh and animated colouring given by a people to its poetry, at a time when a really popular literature exists.

• “In somer, when the shawes be sheyn,
• And leves be large and long,
• Hit is full mery in fayre forest
• To here the foulys song;
• To se the dere draw to the le,
• And leve their hillis hee,
• And shadow hem in the levis grene,
• Under the grenewode tre.
• Hit befel on Whitsontyde,
• Erly on a May mornyng,
• The son up feyre can spring, that day,
• And the birddis mery can sing.
• This is a mery morning, seid litull John,
• Be hym that dyed on tree,
• And moe mery man than I am on,
• Was not in Christante.
• Pluk up thi hert, my dere mayster,
• Litull John can say,
• And think it is a full fayre time,
• In a mornyng of May.
• The on thyng greves me, seyd Robyn
• And does my hert mych woo,
• That I may not no solem day
• To mas ne matyns go.
• Hit is a fourtnet and more, seyd Robyn,
• Sin I my Savyor see;
• To day will I to Notyngham, said Robyn,
• With the myght of Mylde Mary.
• * * * *
• Then Robyn goes to Notyngham,
• Hymselfe mornyng allone,
• * * * *
• He goes into Seinte Mary chyrche,
• And knelyd doun before the rode.1
• * * * *

Robin Hood was not only renowned for his devotion to saints and to saints’ days; he himself had, like the saints, his festival day, in which, religiously observed by the inhabitants of the villages and small towns of England, nothing was permitted but games and amusements. In the fifteenth century, this custom was still observed; and the sons of the Saxons and Normans took part in these popular diversions in common, without reflecting that they were a monument of the old hostility of their ancestors. On that day, the churches were deserted equally with the workshops; no saint, no preacher was more influential than Robin Hood; and this continued even after the Reformation had given a new impulse to religious zeal in England. We have this fact attested by an Anglican bishop of the sixteenth century, the celebrated and excellent Latimer.2 “I came once myselfe,” says the bishop, in the sixth sermon before king Edward VI., “to a place, riding on a jorney homeward from London, and I sent worde over night into the toune that I wolde preche there in the morning, because it was a holy day, and methought it was an holy dayes worke. The church stode in my waye; and I tooke my horse and my company and went thither (I thought I should have found a great company in the churche), and when I came there, the churche dore was fast locked. I taried there half an hower and more; at last the keye was found, and one of the parishe comes to me and says: ‘Sir, this is a busie daye with us, we cannot heare you; it is Robin Hoode’s day.1 The parish are gone abroad togather for Robin Hoode; I pray you let (hender) them not.’ ” The bishop had assumed his ecclesiastical attire, but he was fain to lay it aside, and to continue his journey, giving place to archers dressed in green, who, in a theatre formed of branches, were enacting the parts of Robin Hood, Little John, and all their band.2

Traces of this long-enduring memory, in which were buried even the recollection of the Norman invasion, subsist to the present day. In York, at the mouth of a small river, there is a bay which, in all modern maps, bears the name of Robin Hood’s bay;3 and, not long ago, in the same county, near Pontefract, travellers were shown a spring of clear fresh water, called Robin Hood’s well, at which they were invited to drink in honour of the famous archer.4 Throughout the seventeenth century, old ballads of Robin Hood, printed in gothic letters (a style of printing singularly liked by the lower classes of English), circulated in the country districts, by the medium of hawking pedlars, who sung them in a sort of recitative.5 Several complete collections of them were made for the use of town readers, one of which bore the pretty title of Robin Hood’s Garland. These books, now become rare, interest only the erudite; and the history of the heroes of Sherwood, divested of its poetical decorations, is now scarce found but among children’s tales.

None of the ballads that have been preserved relate the death of Robin Hood; the common tradition is that he perished in a nunnery, whither, one day, being ill, he had repaired for medical aid. He had to be bled, and the nun who performed this operation, having recognised Robin Hood, intentionally drew so much blood from him that he died.6 This story, which can neither be affirmed nor denied, is quite consistent with the manners of the twelfth century; many women, then, in the rich nunneries, studied medicine, and compounded remedies which they administered gratutiously to the poor. Further, in England since the conquest, the superiors of the nunneries and most of the nuns were of Norman extraction, as is proved by their statutes drawn up in old French;1 a circumstance that may, perhaps, explain how the chief of the Saxon bandits, who had been outlawed by royal ordinance, found enemies in the convent where he had sought assistance. After his death, the troop of which he was the chief and the soul disbanded; and his faithful companion, Little John, despairing of being able to hold his ground in England, and urged by a desire to prosecute his old war upon the Normans, went to Ireland, where he took part in the revolts of the natives.2 Thus was dissolved the last troop of English brigands that, having a political character, merit a place in history.

Between the refugees of the camp of Ely and the men of Sherwood, between Hereward and Robin Hood, there had been, especially in the north of England, a succession of partisan chiefs and outlaws, who were not without reputation, but of whom we know too little to admit of our considering them as historical personages. The names of several of them, such as Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, or Clement of the Valley, and William Cloudesly, were long preserved in popular memory. The adventures of these three men, who cannot be separated from each other, any more than Robin Hood from Little John, are the subject of a long poem, composed in the eleventh century, and divided into three parts or cantos.3 Nothing positive can be said as to the authenticity of the facts there related, but they contain many original features calculated to present to the reader in a more striking light the idea which the English had formed of the moral character of those men, who, in the period of servitude, preferred the life of bandits to that of slaves.

Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William Cloudesly, were, it would seem, natives of Cumberland. Having all three infringed the Norman forest laws, they were outlawed, and compelled to flee for their lives.1 United by the same fate, they swore brotherhood, according to the custom of the period, and went together to dwell in the forest of Inglewood, which the old romance calls Englishewood, between Carlisle and Penrith.2 Adam and Clement were not married; but William had a wife and children, whom he soon yearned to see. One day, he said to his two companions that he would go to Carlisle, and visit his wife and children. “Brother,” answered they, “we counsel you not to do this:

• “If the justice may you take
• Your life were at an end.”3

William went despite this advice, and arrived at night in the town; but, recognised by an old woman whom he had once assisted, he was denounced to the judge and to the sheriff, who surrounded his house, took him, and rejoicing at this capture, had a new gibbet raised in the market-place to hang him.4 Fortunately, a little boy, a swineherd, who, while with his swine in the wood, had often seen William, and received alms and food from him, hastened to inform Adam and Clym of the fate of their adopted brother.5 The dangerous enterprise in which they engaged to save him is described with infinite animation by the old popular poet, whose description of the devotion of these men to each other is full of natural ease and truth:

• “William said to his brethren two,
• ‘This day let us live and die;
• If ever you have need, as I have now
• The same shall you find by me.’ ”6

In the combat, terminated by this unexpected deliverance, the three brothers-in-arms made great carnage of the royal officers and justice-men of Carlisle. They killed the sheriff, the judge, and the town-porter.

• “Many a man to the ground they threw,
• * * * * * * *
• Many a woman said—‘Alas!’ ”1

It is in a tone of pleasantry and a spirit of rejoicing that these numerous murders are related in the old song, the author of which manifests little goodwill to the agents of royal authority. His three heroes, however, end as the nation itself had ended, by growing weary of their resistance, and by coming to terms with the enemy. They proceed to London, to the king’s palace, seeking a charter of peace. But even at the moment of making this act of submission, they retain their old character of pride and savage freedom:

• “Of no man would they ask no leave,
• But boldly went in thereat;
• They preced prestly unto the hall,
• Of no man have they dread . . . . ”2

If Robin Hood be the last chief of outlaws or Anglo-Saxon bandits that has enjoyed veritable popular celebrity, we are not thence to conclude that no man of the same race followed after him the same kind of life, in a spirit of political hostility to the government exercised by men of foreign race and language. The national struggle would continue under the form of brigandage, and the idea of freeman and of enemy to the foreign law, long remained associated together. But this had an end; and as the epoch of the conquest receded, as the English race, growing accustomed to the yoke, became attached by habit to that which it had tolerated from despair, brigandage gradually lost its patriotic sanction, and re-descended to its natural condition, that of an infamous profession. From that time forth the business of a bandit in the forests of England, without becoming less perilous, without requiring less individual courage and address, no longer produced heroes. There only remained in the opinion of the lower classes a great indulgence for the infractions of the game laws, and a marked sympathy for those who, from need or pride, braved these laws of the conquest. The life of the adventurous poacher, and in general the forest life, are affectionately celebrated in many comparatively modern songs and poems, all vaunting the independence enjoyed under the greenwood, in the good greenwood1 where there are no enemies but winter and rough weather,2 where—

• “All are mery and free,
• As happy as the day is long, as leaf on the tree.”3

King Richard, on his return to London, was crowned a second time with ceremonies that we have seen exactly reproduced in our days.4 After the rejoicings at this second coronation, he annulled at one stroke all the sales of domains that he had so freely made before departing for the crusade, alleging them to have been pledges which the holders were bound to restore. It was all in vain that the buyers presented their deeds, sealed with the great seal of the crown. The king, giving a mild form to this compulsory expropriation, said to them: “What pretext have you for retaining in your hands that which belongs to us? have you not amply repaid yourselves your advances out of the revenue of our domains? If so, you know that it is a sin to exercise usury towards the king, and that we have a bull from the pope prohibiting this under pain of excommunication. If upon a just account of what you have paid and what you have received, there should appear to be any balance due to you, we will pay it out of our own treasury, to leave you no subject of complaint.”5

No one had the courage to present such an account, and all was restored to the king without any compensation. He thus resumed possession of the castles, towns, offices, and domains that he had alienated; and this was the first benefit that the Norman race of England derived from the return of its chief, without whom the courtiers had declared it could not live, any more than a body without a head. As to the English race, after having been crushed with taxes for the deliverance of the king, it was crushed once more for that of the hostages whom Richard had left in Germany, and for the expenses of the war he had to maintain against the king of France.1

It was not only in Normandy that Philip threatened to annihilate the power of his rival; he had leagued himself again with the barons of the north of Aquitaine; he had promised them aid and succours, and they, encouraged rather by his promises than by any actual assistance of his, had again attempted to establish their independence against the Anglo-Norman power.2 It was the passion of nationality and the desire to be the subject of no neighbouring king, of no man who was not of their own race and language, that had induced them to conclude the alliance with king Philip; but he, heeding not their patriotic sentiments, had wholly different views with reference to them. He aspired to extend his authority over the Gaulish provinces of the south, so as to become king of all Gaul, instead of being only king of France. Following the example of the Germanic chancery, which attributed to each successive emperor the actual possession of all the territories that his predecessors had governed and lost, the king of France and his council carried back, in idea, the boundaries of their legitimate dominion to the Pyrenees, where it was believed that Charlemagne had raised a cross to serve as a perpetual limit between France and Spain.3 “It is thither,” said a poet of the period, a parasite of king Philip, “it is thither thou shouldst extend thy tents and thy territories, that thou mayest possess without reserve the domains of thy ancestors, that the stranger may no longer occupy a foot of land within our frontiers, and that the white dragon, with its venemous brood, may be extirpated from our gardens, as the Breton prophet promised us.”1

Thus the patriotic predictions put forth by the ancient Cambrian bards, to raise the courage of their nation, invaded by the Anglo-Saxons, passed, after the lapse of more than five hundred years, as prophecies in favour of the French against the Normans. This is, doubtless, a striking illustration of the capricious turns of human affairs; and another, not less remarkable, is, that the same provinces which the king of France alleged to be his, as the inheritance of Charlemagne, the emperor also claimed, in virtue of the rights of the same prince, who enjoyed the singular privilege of being regarded at once as French and as German. The cession of lands recently made by the Cæsar of Germany to king Richard was founded on this pretension. Besides the whole of Provence and part of Burgundy, imperial liberality, according to the ancient historians, had also granted him, over the county of Toulouse that right of perpetual suzerainty which the king of France at the same time asserted for himself. But, in reality, the counts of Toulouse enjoyed full political independence, and, according to the forms of the age, were free of their homage.2

On the eve of opening the campaign against the king of France, Richard thought it necessary to operate upon public opinion, by relieving himself, in a striking manner, from the reproach of the murder of the marquis of Montferrat. He produced a forged autograph letter of the Old Man of the Mountain, written in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin characters, and containing the following passages:3

“To Leopold, duke of Austria, and to all the princes and peoples of the Christian faith, greeting. Seeing that several kings in foreign lands impute the death of the marquis to Richard, king and lord of England, I swear, by the God who reigns eternally, and by the law which we obey, that king Richard had no share in that murder. Know that we have given these presents in our house and castle of Messiac, the middle of September, and have sealed them with our seal, the year 1505 after Alexander.”4

This singular despatch was officially published by William de Longchamp, who had again become chancellor of England, and sent to the foreign princes and to the monks who were known to occupy themselves in drawing up the chronicles of the time.1 Its manifest falsity was not remarked in an age when historical criticism and the knowledge of Eastern manners had slight prevalence in Europe. It even weakened, it would seem, the moral effect of the imputations of the king of France among his own vassals, and encouraged those of the king of England to fight more determinedly in a cause which they now thought the good cause; for there was at this period much superstition on this point. As soon as the two armies approached each other in Normandy, the army of France, which hitherto had ever taken the lead, began to retrograde. Earl John lost all courage as soon as he saw the chances of war becoming uncertain, and he resolved to betray his allies in order to regain his brother’s favour. This treason was accompanied by atrocious circumstances—by the massacre of a great number of French knights whom the earl had invited to an entertainment. But notwithstanding all his vast demonstrations of repentance and friendship, Richard, who remembered that he had more than once acted a similar part towards their father, Henry II., placed no reliance in him, and, to use the words of the contemporary historians, gave him neither lands, nor towns, nor castles.2

King Philip, successively driven from all the towns of Normandy that he had occupied, was soon fain to conclude a truce, which allowed Richard to carry his arms southward, against the insurgents of Aquitaine.3 At their head were the viscount of Limoges and the count of Perigord, whom king Richard summoned to surrender up their castles. “We hold thy menaces as nought,” they answered: “thou hast returned far too proud, and we will render thee, despite thyself, humble, courteous, and frank, and will chastise thee by warring against thee.”4 To render this reply more than a mere gasconade, it was necessary that peace should again be broken between the two kings; for the insurgents were by no means able to resist the forces of Richard, unless Philip kept at least a portion of those forces engaged. It was the famous Bertrand de Born, who, pursuing his political system, employed himself in rekindling war between the two enemies of his country. By his secret intrigues and his satirical verses, he determined the king of France to violate the truce he had just sworn; and, this time, the field of battle was Saintonge instead of Normandy. The first encounter of the two kings, at the head of their troops, took place at Mirambeau. They were only separated by a rivulet, on the banks of which each had respectively pitched his camp.1 The king of France had with him French, Burgundians, Flemings, and men of Champagne and of Berri; the king of England, Normans, English, Angevins, Tourainese, Manceaux, and men of Saintonge.2

Whilst the two hostile armies were thus in presence of each other, both armed, several times, for the purpose of beginning the fight; but the archbishops, bishops, abbots, and other ecclesiastics, who had met together to labour for the re-establishment of peace, went from one camp to the other, intreating the kings to postpone the battle, and proposing arrangements which they deemed calculated to terminate the war. King Philip was the most difficult to persuade and the most exacting in his demands; he was resolved to fight, he said, unless Richard made him the oath of vassalage for Normandy, Guienne, and Poitou. This was his final resolve; as soon as it was repeated to Richard, the English monarch vaulted on his horse, placed his helmet on his head, gave the signal to advance and to sound trumpet, and unfurled his banner to cross the water. “Now, this confidence was given him,” says an old history in the Provençal language, “by the circumstance that the Champagnese had secretly promised him that they would not come to blows with his men, by reason of the great quantity of sterlings he had distributed among them.3

On their side, king Philip and all his people mounted their horses, and armed, with the exception of the Champagnese, who did not put on their helmets. This was the sign of their defection, and it intimidated the king of France, who had in no way anticipated it. This alarm changed all his views; and immediately sending for the bishops and ecclesiastics who had before intreated him in vain, he begged them to go, and say to Richard, that he declared him free from all vassalage, if he would conclude a peace. The king of England was already in full march, when the prelates and monks met him, carrying crucifixes in their arms, weeping, and conjuring him to have mercy on so many brave men, who, on both sides, would perish if a battle took place. They undertook that the king of France should comply with all his demands, and should immediately withdraw to his own territory. Peace was granted, the two kings swore a truce of ten years and dismissed their troops, no longer wishing to occupy themselves with arms, says an old chronicle, but only with the chase, with games, and with maltreating their men.1

The evil that king Philip could do to his Frenchmen was slight in comparison with that which Richard now inflicted upon the Aquitans, and more especially upon those who had revolted against him. “This peace was a great affliction to them,” says the same narrator; “and especially to Bertrand de Born, who was more chagrined thereat than any other person, for he delighted only in war, and above all in war between the two kings.”2 He had once more recourse to his usual device of biting satire against the most irritable of the two rivals. He circulated poems in which he said that the French and Burgundians had exchanged honour for base crouching, and that king Philip was all hot for war before he had put on his armour, but that, as soon as he was armed, he lost courage.3 On their part, the other barons of Poitou and the Limousin, the same who had so fruitlessly made war upon king Richard, now excited that monarch to enter once more the field against the king of France, promising him their aid. Richard believed them, and, suddenly recommencing hostilities, devastated the provinces of France that bordered on his own.4

King Philip, who would probably have been the first to recommence the war, had he been the first ready, complained of this violation of the sworn truce, and addressed himself to the bishops under whose auspices and guarantee it had been concluded. These again interposed, and obtained from the king of England his consent that a diplomatic conference should be held on the frontiers of Berri and Touraine. But the two kings, unable to agree upon any one point, began to abuse each other; and he of England gave the other the lie to his face, and called him a base renegade. “Whereat Bertrand de Born rejoiced,” says his old biographer, “and composed a sirvente, in which he urged the king of France to commence the war with fire and blood, and reproached him with loving peace more than a monk. But despite all that Bertrand de Born could say in sirventes and couplets to king Philip, reminding him of the injury and shame that had been done him, he would not war against king Richard; but Richard warred against him, pillaged, took and burned his villages and his towns; at which all his barons, who loved not the peace, rejoiced, and Bertrand de Born composed another sirvente to confirm Richard in his purpose.”1

The destiny of Aquitaine to be incessantly balanced between two foreign powers, equally hostile to its independence, and yet by turns its allies, according to the circumstances of the warfare which divided them; this destiny, which afterwards became that of Italy, weighed at this period upon the whole of southern Gaul, comprising the mountainous country called Alvernhe in the Romane language of the south, and Auvergne in that of the north. This country, after having energetically resisted the invasion of the Franks, conquered by them, in common with the rest of the Gaulish territory, had been, for a time, comprehended in their conquest; it had then recovered its national freedom under the roi-faineans, the successors of Chlodowig; then devastated, and again conquered by the sons of Karle-Martel, it had become a province of the vast empire which they founded. Lastly, the dismemberment and total ruin of this empire had once more emancipated it; so that, in the twelfth century, the people of Auvergne were governed as freely as the civilization of the epoch admitted, by lords of their own race and language, who bore the title of counts, and who were also called dauphins (dalfins, dolphins), because a figure of this fish formed part of their coat-of-arms.

The dauphin of Auvergne acknowledged as suzerains the dukes of Aquitaine, perhaps from a reminiscence of the government of the Romans and of the subordination of the local magistrates of the empire to the provincial magistrates. As duke of Aquitaine, the king of England had received his oath of vassalage, according to the ancient custom, and the dauphin had exhibited no repugnance to render this purely nominal duty of submission. But it happened that after having, without much success, ravaged the dominions of the king of France, Richard, weary of the war, and desirous of concluding a truce more durable than the preceding, proposed to his rival to exchange with him the suzerainty of Auvergne for other political advantages. This proposition was accepted, and the king of England undertook to guarantee the cession he had made, or, in other words, to aid him in overcoming any objection on the part of the people of the country. This objection was soon manifested, the Auvergnats refusing to accept the king of France as their suzerain, first, because they had never had any such relations with him; and secondly, says an old history, because he was avaricious, a bad lord, and too near a neighbour. As soon as he had sent his officers to receive the homage of the count of Auvergne, who dared not at first refuse it, he purchased one of the strongest fortresses in the country, and garrisoned it; and shortly afterwards took from the count the town of Issoire, thus preparing the way for the conquest of the whole country, a conquest which he hoped to achieve without a war.

Richard perceived the projects of the king of France, but he took no steps to arrest them, foreseeing that Auvergne would one day lose patience, and relying upon the national hatred which the new lord was increasing, not only to regain the suzerainty, but to derive aid from it in the first war he should undertake against the rival of his ambition. And, accordingly, as soon as he deemed fit to break the truce, he sent word to the dauphin: “I know the great injuries the king of France has done you and your lands; and if you will, by revolting, lend me aid, I will support you, and will give you knights, cross-bowmen, and money, as much as you require.” The count of Auvergne, crediting these promises, proclaimed the ban of national insurrection throughout his country, and commenced war against king Philip. But when Richard saw the struggle begun, he acted towards the Auvergnats as Louis, father of Philip, had acted towards the Poitevins; he formed a renewed truce with the king of France, and passed over into England, without in the smallest degree troubling himself as to the fate of the dauphin and of Auvergne. The French army entered that country, and, as the ancient chronicle expresses it, put it to fire and flame, seizing the fortified towns and the finest castles. Unable to resist such an enemy single-handed, the dauphin concluded a suspension of arms, during which he sent his cousin, count Gui, and ten of his knights to England, to remind king Richard of the promises he had made. Richard gave the count and his companions an ill reception, and sent them back without affording them men, arms, or money.

Ashamed and afflicted at having been thus deceived, and yielding of necessity to their fate, the Auvergnats made peace with the king of France, acknowledging his suzerainty over them, and again swearing to him the oath of homage. Shortly afterwards the truce between the two kings expired, and Philip immediately resumed fierce war upon the continental subjects of his rival. At this intelligence Richard proceeded to Normandy, whence he sent a message to the dauphin of Auvergne and count Gui, to the effect that the truce being broken between himself and the king of France, they ought, as loyal friends, to come to his aid, and fight for him. But they were not to be deceived a second time, and remained at peace with king Philip. Richard, hereupon, by way of avenging himself, composed, in the Provençal tongue, satirical couplets in which he said that, after having sworn fealty to him, the dauphin abandoned him in the hour of danger. The dauphin, equally ready with his pen, answered the king’s verses in others characterized by more candour and dignity. “King,” said he, “since you sing of me, you shall find me responsive. If ever I vowed an oath to you ’twas madness and folly on my part; I am not a crowned king, or a man of great riches: yet I can keep my own with my people, between Puy and Aubusson; and thank God I am neither a serf nor a Jew.”1

This last epigrammatic stroke seems allusive to the massacre and spoliation of the Jews which had taken place in England in the commencement of Richard’s reign,1 and to the miserable condition of the natives of that country. However imperfect the state of society, in the twelfth century, in the southern provinces of Gaul, there was an enormous distance between its system and that of England, governed by foreigners. The difference of language, combining with that of condition, the haughtiness of the noble, all the greater that he had less means of entering into moral relation with his inferiors, that Norman insolence which, according to the old poet, increased with years,2 and the hostility of races, still vivid in the heart of the English, all this gave to the country an aspect somewhat similar to that of Greece under the rule of the Turks. There were Saxon families who, by an hereditary vow, had bound themselves, from father to son, to wear the beard long, as a memory of the old country and a token of disdain for the customs introduced by the conquest.3 But these families could do nothing, and the sons of the conquerors, not fearing them, allowed them to display in peace the mark of their descent, and the futile pride of a time which could never return.

In the year 1196, when king Richard was occupied in warring against the king of France, and his officers were levying money for the expenses of his campaigns and the payment of the balance of his ransom, the city of London was called upon to pay an extraordinary tax.4 The king’s chancellor addressed the demand to the chiefs of the city, who, by a singular association of the two languages spoken in England, were called mayor and aldermen.5 These convoked, in the Guild-hall, or husting, as it was designated in the Saxon tongue, the principal citizens to deliberate, not as to granting the subsidy, but simply as to the proportions in which it should be paid by the citizens.6 In this assembly, composed for the most part of native English, there was a certain number of men of Norman, Angevin, or French race, whose ancestors, settling in England at the time of the conquest, had devoted themselves to commerce or trade. Either by reason of their foreign descent or of their riches, the citizens of this class formed in London a sort of ruling party; they governed the deliberations of the council, and often silenced the English, whom the habit of being oppressed rendered timid and circumspect.

But there was, at this time, in the class of natives, a man of very different character, a genuine old Saxon patriot, who let his beard grow, that he might in no way resemble the sons of the foreigners.1 His name was William, and he enjoyed great consideration in the city, on account of his zeal in defending, by every legal means, those of his fellow citizens who underwent injustice.2 The child of parents, whose industry and economy had secured him an independence, he had retired from business, and passed all his time in the study of jurisprudence.3 No Norman clerk surpassed him in the art of pleading in the French tongue, before a court of justice, and when he spoke English, his eloquence was vigorous and popular. He devoted his knowledge of the law and his power of language to save the poorer citizens from the embarrassments in which legal chicanery had involved them, and to protect them from the vexations of the rich, the most frequent of which was the unequal partition of the taxes.4 Sometimes the mayor and aldermen altogether exempted from the payment of taxes those who were best able to pay them, sometimes they called upon every citizen to contribute the same amount, without any regard to the difference of means, so that the heaviest burden fell upon the poor.5 These had often remonstrated, and William had pleaded their cause with more ardour than success.6 His efforts had rendered him dear to the citizens of lower condition, who named him the poor man’s advocate;7 on the other hand, the Normans and their party surnamed him, ironically, the man with thebeard, and accused him of leading the multitude astray, by giving them a measureless desire for liberty and happiness.1

This singular personage, the last representative of the hostility of the two races which the conquest had united on the same soil, appeared in his accustomed character at the common council of 1196. As mostly their habit, the leading citizens were for a distribution of the common charges that should throw only the smallest portion on themselves; William Longbeard alone, or almost alone,2 opposed them, and the dispute growing warm, they overwhelmed him with abuse, and accused him of rebellion and of treason to the king. “The traitors to the king,” answered the Englishman, “are they who defraud his exchequer, by exempting themselves from paying what they owe him, and I myself will denounce them to him.”3 He passed the sea, went to Richard’s camp, and kneeling before him and raising his right hand, demanded from him peace and protection for the poor people of London. Richard listened to his plaint, said that he would do it right, and when the petitioner departed, thought no more of the matter, too much occupied with his great political affairs to descend to the details of a dispute between simple citizens.4

But the Norman barons and prelates who filled the higher posts in the chancery and treasury took up the matter, and, from the instinct of nationality and aristocracy, warmly opposed the poor and their advocate. Hubert Gaultier, archbishop of Canterbury and grand justiciary of England, enraged that a Saxon should dare to denounce to the king men of Norman race, and apprehending a recurrence of the circumstance, ordered by edict every citizen of London to remain in the city, under penalty of being imprisoned as traitor to the king and kingdom.5 Several merchants who, despite the orders of the grand justiciary, went to Stamford fair, were arrested and imprisoned.6 These acts of violence caused a great fermentation in the city; and the poorer citizens, by an instinct natural to man in all times, formed an association for their mutual defence. William with the Long Beard was the soul and chief of this secret society, in which, say the contemporary historians, fifty-two thousand persons were engaged.1 They collected such arms as citizens, half serfs, could procure in the middle ages, iron-headed staves, axes, and iron crow-bars, wherewith to attack the fortified houses of the Normans, if they came to blows.2

Urged by a natural desire to intercommunicate their sentiments and encourage each other, the poor of London assembled from time to time and held meetings in the open air, in the squares, and the market-places. At these tumultuous meetings William was the spokesman, and received applause which, perhaps, he was too fond of receiving, and which thus made him neglect the moment to act and to strike a decisive blow for the interests of those whom he sought to render formidable to their oppressors. A fragment of one of these harangues is given by a contemporary chronicler, who declares that he had it from the mouth of a person who was present. The speech, though its purpose was entirely political, turned, like the sermons of our days, upon a text from scripture, and this text was: “With joy shall ye draw water of the wells of salvation.” William applied these words to himself: “It is I,” he said, “who am the saviour of the poor; you, poor, who have felt how heavy is the hand of the rich, draw now from my well of water a salutary doctrine; and draw thence joyfully, because the hour of your relief is at hand. I shall separate the waters from the waters, that is to say, the men from the men; I will separate the people, humble and of good faith, from the proud and faithless; I will separate the elect from the reprobate, as light from darkness.” Under this vague and mystic phraseology, the imagination of the hearers doubtless discerned sentiments and desires of a more precise nature; but the popular enthusiasm was not promptly turned to account; and the advocate of the poor allowed himself to be forestalled by the high Norman functionaries, who, assembling in parliament at London the bishops, earls, and barons, of the surrounding counties, cited the orator of the people to appear before this assembly.3

William obeyed the summons, escorted by a great multitude who followed him, calling him the saviour and king of the poor. This unequivocal manifestation of immense popularity intimidated the barons of the parliament; employing artifice, they postponed the proceedings to a future sitting, which did not take place, and occupied themselves in working on the minds of the people by skilful emissaries.1 False promises and false alarms, aptly disseminated, calmed the public effervescence and discouraged the partisans of insurrection. The archbishop of Canterbury and the other justiciaries themselves convoked several meetings of the petty citizens of London; and discoursing to them, sometimes of the necessity of preserving order and peace, sometimes of the king’s ample means of crushing sedition, they succeeded in spreading doubt and hesitation among the conspirators.2 Seizing this moment of weakness and vacillation, ever fatal to popular parties, they demanded, as hostages and guarantees of the public tranquillity, the children of a great many families of the middle and lower classes. The citizens had not sufficient resolution to oppose this demand; and the cause of power was gained, as soon as the hostages, taken from London, were imprisoned in various fortresses.3

Notwithstanding the influence given them by the anxiety which prevailed in London as to the fate of the hostages, the justiciaries dared not publicly arrest the man whose destruction was contemplated in all these proceedings. They resolved to watch a moment when William should be from home alone, or with but few companions; two rich citizens, probably of Norman race, and one of whom was named Geoffroy, undertook this duty.4 Followed by armed men, they watched for several days all the movements of the Man with the Long-Beard; and one day, as he was quietly walking with nine friends, the two citizens approached him with an air of indifference, and, suddenly, Geoffroy laid hands on him, and gave the signal for the men-at-arms to advance.5 William’s only weapon of defence was one of those long knives which, at that period, were worn in the belt; he drew it, and with one blow laid Geoffroy at his feet. The soldiers came up at the same moment, armed, from head to foot, in dagger-proof mail; but William and his nine companions, by dint of courage and address, got clear of them, and took refuge in the nearest church, dedicated to the Virgin, and called by the Normans the church of Saint-Mary de l’Arche.1 They closed and barricadoed the doors. Their armed pursuers endeavoured unavailingly to force an entrance; the grand justiciary, on learning the news, sent couriers to the adjacent castles for more troops, not relying, at this critical juncture, on the garrison of the Tower of London alone.2

The report of these events caused great fermentation in the town: the people were sensible to the danger of a man who had so generously taken up their defence;3 but in general they exhibited more of sorrow than of anger. The sight of the soldiers marching into the city, and occupying the streets and market-places, and above all the conviction that, on the first outbreak, the hostages would be put to death, kept the citizens in their shops.4 It was in vain that the refugees awaited assistance, and that a few determined men exhorted their fellow citizens to march in arms to Saint Mary’s church. The masses remained motionless as if struck with stupor.5

Meanwhile, William and his friends prepared, as best they might, to sustain a siege in the tower, whither they had retired; repeatedly summoned to come forth, they pertinaciously refused to do so; and the archbishop of Canterbury, in order to force them from their post, had a quantity of wood collected, and set fire to the church.6 The heat and the smoke which soon filled the tower, compelled the besieged to descend, half suffocated.7 They were all taken, and as they were being led away bound, the son of the Geoffroy whom William had killed, approached him, and with a knife ripped open his stomach.8 Wounded as he was, they tied him to a horse’s tail, and dragged him thus through the streets to the Tower, where he appeared before the archbishop, and, without any sort of trial, received sentence of death. The same horse dragged him in the same manner to the place of execution.1 He was hanged with his nine companions; “and thus,” says an old historian, “perished William Longbeard, for having embraced the defence of the poor and of truth, if the cause makes the martyr, none may more justly than he be called a martyr.”2

This opinion was not that of one man only, but of all the people of London; who, though they had not had the energy to save their defender, at least wept for him after his death, and regarded as assassins the judges who had condemned him. The gibbet on which he had been hanged was carried away in the night as a relic, and those who could not procure any part of the wood, collected pieces of the earth in which it had stood. So many came for this earth, that in a short time a large pit was formed on the place of execution. People went there not only from the vicinity, but from all parts of the island, and no native Englishman failed to fulfil this patriotic pilgrimage when his affairs called him to London.3

Ere long, popular imagination attributed the gift of miracles to this new martyr in the cause of resistance to foreign domination; his miracles were preached, as those of Waltheof had been, by a priest of Saxon origin;4 but the new preacher shared the fate of the former, and it was no less dangerous now to believe in the sanctity of Him with the Long Beard than it had been, an hundred and twenty years before, to believe in that of the last Anglo-Saxon chief. The grand justiciary Hubert sent soldiers to disperse with their lances the crowd who assembled to insult him, as he said, by bestowing such honours on the memory of an executed malefactor.5 But the English were not disheartened; driven away in the day, they returned at night to pray; soldiers were placed in ambush, and seized a great number of men and women, who were publicly whipped, and then imprisoned.6 At length, a permanent guard, posted on the spot which the English persisted in regarding as hallowed, prevented all access to it, the only measure that could discourage the popular enthusiasm, which then by degrees died away.1

Here should properly terminate the narrative of the national struggle which followed the conquest of England by the Normans; for the execution of William Longbeard is the last fact which the original authors positively connect with the conquest. That there were, at subsequent periods, other events impressed with the same character, and that William was not the last of the Saxons, are indubitable propositions, but the inexactitude of the chronicles, and the loss of ancient documents, leave us without any proofs on this subject, and reduce us, all at once, to inductions and conjectures. The main task of the conscientious narrator, therefore, ends at this point; and there only remains for him to present, in a summary form, the ulterior destiny of the persons whom he has brought upon the stage, so that the reader may not remain in suspense.

And by the word personages, it is neither Richard, king of England, nor Philip, king of France, nor John, earl of Mortain, that is to be understood; but the great masses of men and the various populations who have simultaneously or successively figured in the preceding pages. For the essential object of this history is to contemplate the destiny of peoples, and not that of certain celebrated men; to relate the adventures of social, and not those of individual life. Human sympathy may attach itself to entire populations, as to beings endowed with sentiment, whose existence, longer than our own, is filled with the same alternations of sorrow and of joy, of hope and of despair. Considered in this light, the history of the past assumes somewhat of the interest which is felt in the present; for the collective beings of whom it treats have not ceased to live and to feel; they are the same who still suffer or hope under our own eyes. This is its most attractive feature; this it is that sweetens severe and arid study; that, in a word, would confer some value upon this work, if the author had succeeded in communicating to his readers those emotions which he himself experienced while seeking in old books names now obscure and misfortunes now forgotten.

[1 ] Giraldus Cambrensis, Hibernia expugnata, p. 787.

[2 ] Campion, History of Ireland, 62—64; Hanmer, Chronicle of Ireland, p. 162: two works of the most exact authority in all that relates to the conquest of Ireland by the Anglo-Normans; faithfully, and, in many cases, literally extracted from the original documents.

[3 ] Girald. Camb., ut sup. p. 799. Campion, p. 66. Hanmer, p. 165.

[1 ] Hanmer. p. 136. Campion, p. 65. Harris, Hibernica, (Dublin, 1770) part ii. p. 212.

[2 ] Interfectis quibusdam Anglicis qui inter eos habitationem elegerant, et quorum magna pars in eorum exercitu fuit. (Hemingford, Chron., p. 502.)

[3 ] Constantes in levitate fideles in perfidiâ suâ. (Giraldus Cambrens.)

[4 ] Girald. Camb., Hibernia expug., p. 792. Hanmer, p. 140.

[1 ] Hanmer, p. 148. Campion, p. 66.

[2 ] Girald. Camb., ut sup. p. 794.

[3 ] Hanmer, p. 288.

[4 ] Hanmer, p. 159.

[5 ]Ib.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 567. Hanmer, p. 159.

[2 ] Roger. de Hoveden, loc. sup. cit.

[1 ] Hanmer, p. 166. Campion, p. 68.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 630.

[1 ] Johan. de Fordun, Scoti-chronicon, p. 908—924.

[1 ] Radulf. de Diceto, ut sup. p. 534.

[2 ] Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xii. et seq.; passim.

[1 ] Gervasius Tilberiensis, Otia imperialia, apud Script. rer. Brunsvic., i. 921.

[2 ]Ib.

[3 ] Willelm. Malmesb., De gestis reg. Anglic., lib. iii., apud Rer. Anglic. Script., (Savile) p. 115.

[4 ] Plurimam quippe animositatis scintillam exprimere, plurimam rebellionis audaciam imprimere potest continua pristinæ nobilitatis memoria...et...regni Britannici tantæ et tam diuturnæ regiæ majestatis recordatio. (Ciraldus Cambrensis, De illaudabilibus Walliæ; Anglia Sacra, ii. 455.)

[5 ] Britonum ridenda fides et credulus error.

(Ducange, Glossarium, verbo Arturum expectare.)

[1 ] Cambro-Briton, ii. 366.

[2 ]Ib.

[3 ] Horæ Britannicæ, ii. 199.

[4 ] Giraldus Camb., loc. sup. cit., p. 455.

[5 ] Roberts, Sketch of the Early History of the Kymry, p. 147.

[1 ] Knyghton, De event Angl., ut sup. col. 2395. Camden, Anglica, &c., p. 840.

[2 ]Ib.

[3 ] Usque ad novissimum quadrantem. (Roger. de Hoveden, p. 654.)

[4 ]Ib. p. 658.

[1 ]Ib. p. 660.

[2 ] Firma burgi. (See Hallam, Europe in the Middle Ages.)

[3 ] See Hallam, ib.

[4 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 363.

[5 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 660.

[1 ]Ib. p. 664—667.

[2 ] Sismondi, H. des Français, vi. 96.

[3 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 667, 668.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 673.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoveden, 674—688.

[1 ]Ib. 688.

[2 ]Ib. 674, 675.

[3 ] Radulfus Coggeshalæ, Abbat., Chron., apud Script. rer. Gallic. et Franc., xviii. 64.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 694.

[2 ] Rigordus, apud Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xvii. 36.

[3 ] Joh. Bromton, col. 1243.

[4 ] Roger. de Hoveden, loc. sup. cit.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 680—701.

[2 ]Ib.

[3 ] Matth. Paris, i. 166.

[4 ] Gervas. Cantuar., Chron., col. 1578.

[5 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 398.

[6 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 703.

[7 ] Joh. Bromton. col. 1213.

[1 ] Joh. Bromton, col. 1223.

[2 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 700.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 701.

[2 ] Badulf. de Diceto, col. 664.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 704.

[2 ]Ib.

[1 ]Ib. p. 704.

[2 ]Ib. p. 708.

[3 ] Guill Neubrig., p. 428.

[4 ]Ib. p. 437.

[5 ] Rigordus, ut sup. p. 37. Roger. de Hoveden, p. 716.

[1 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 435. The appellation senex (old man), given by the crusaders to the chief of the tribe of Assassins, is a translation of the Arabian word Scherk, elder, chief of a tribe.

[2 ] This plant is a species of hemp, called in Arabic haschische. See M. de Sacy, Chrestomathie Arabe.

[3 ] Rigordus, loc. sup. cit.

[4 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 437.

[5 ]Ib.

[1 ] Radulph. Coggeshalæ, ut sup. p. 65.

[2 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 438.

[3 ] Guill. Armoric., De Gestis Phil. Augusti, apud Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xvii. 71. Chroniques de St. Denis, ib. p. 377.

[4 ] Guill. Neubrig., loc. sup. cit.

[5 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 716.

[1 ]Leot-polde, brave among the people.

[1 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 457—459. Radulph. Coggeslialæ, ut sup. 71, 72.

[2 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 466.

[1 ] Joh. Bromton, col. 1252.

[2 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 465.

[3 ]Ib.

[4 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 724.

[5 ]Ib.

[6 ]Ib. p. 722.

[7 ]Ib.

[1 ]Ib. p. 724.

[2 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 477.

[3 ] Rigordus, ut sup. p. 40. Roger. de Hoveden, loc. sup. cit.

[4 ] Rigordus, ut sup.

[5 ] Annales Waverleienses, apud Script. rer. Anglic. (Gale), ii. 164.

[1 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 467, 468.

[2 ]Ib. 478.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 732.

[2 ]Ib.

[3 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 478.

[4 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 733.

[5 ]Ib.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 734. Guill. Neubrig., p. 482.

[2 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 484.

[3 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 736.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 736.

[2 ]Ib.

[3 ] See Appendix No. XX.

[1 ] Johan. de Fordun, Scoti-chronicon, p. 774.

[2 ] Robin Hood, a collection of all the ancient poems, songs, and ballads relating to that famous outlaw, passim.

[4 ] See Appendix No. XX.

[2 ] Stowe, Annales, or a general Chronicle of England (London, 1631), p. 159.

[3 ] Jamieson’s Popular Songs, ii. 152.

[4 ] The Life of Robin Hood.

[1 ]Ib.

[2 ] Joh. de Fordun, p. 774.

[3 ]Ib.

[1 ] Robin Hood, &c., vol. i.

[2 ]Ib.—Notes to vol. i. p. 106, 107.

[1 ] See Hawkins, General Hist. of Music, iii. 411.

[2 ] Robin Hood, &c., notes, ut sup.

[3 ] See Hawkins, General Hist. of Music, ii. 411.

[4 ] Evelyn’s Diary.

[5 ] Hawkins, ii. 410.

[6 ] Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, i. 198. (Sixth edition.)

[1 ] Regulæ monialium Beatæ Mariæ de Sopwell, in auctuario additament. ad. Matth. Paris, i. 261.

[2 ] Hanmer, Chron. of Ireland, p. 179.

[3 ] Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, i. 270. Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry, (London, 1791) p. 5.

[3 ]Ib.

[5 ]Ib.

[6 ]Ib. p. 17.

[1 ]Ib.

[2 ]Ib. p. 22.

[1 ] Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry, passim.

[2 ] As You Like It. act ii. scene i.

[3 ] Ancient Popular Songs, passim.

[4 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 738.

[5 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 493.

[1 ]Ib. 494.

[2 ] Per lo mantenemen qu’el reis de Fransa lor avia fait et fazia. (Raynouard, Choix des poesies des Troubadours, v. 96.)

[1 ]Ib. p. 286.

[2 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 732.

[3 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 548.

[4 ] Radulf. de Diceto, col. 680, 681.

[1 ]Ib.

[2 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 740.

[3 ] Raynouard, loc. sup. cit.

[4 ] Raynouard, ubi sup.

[1 ] Et era sobre la riba d’un flum que a nom Gaura loquals passa al pe de Niort. (Ib. p. 92.) The town here named is Petit-Niort in Saintonge.

[2 ]Ib.

[3 ]Ib. pp. 92, 93.

[1 ]Ib., p. 93.

[2 ]Ib.

[3 ]Ib. iv. 170. See Appendix Nos. XXII., XXIII.

[4 ]Ib. v. 94.

[1 ]Ib. 94-96, and iv. 175.

[1 ]Ib. v. 431, and iv. 256, 257. See Appendix XXIV.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 657.

[2 ] Fastus Normannis crescit crescentibus annis. (Ib.)

[3 ] Matth. Paris, i. 181.

[4 ] Propter regis captionem et alia accidentia. (Roger. de Hoveden, p. 765.)

[5 ] Quos majores et aldermannos dicimus. (Matth. Paris, i. 181.)

[6 ]Ib.—Hus, house; ting, thing, affair, judgment. (Radulf. de Diceto col. 691.)

[1 ] Matth. Paris, i. 181. Matth. Westmonast., Flores Hist., p. 260.

[2 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 765.

[3 ]Ib.—Gervas. Cantuar., Chron., col. 1591. Guill. Neubrig., p. 530.

[4 ] Roger. de Hoveden, loc sup. cit.

[5 ] Matth. Paris, i. 181.

[6 ] Radulf. de Diceto, i. 691.

[7 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 561. Gervas. Cantuar., ut sup.

[1 ] Matth. Westmon., loc. sup. cit. Guill. Neubrig., p. 560.

[2 ] Matth. Paris, i. 181.

[3 ] Id. ib.—Guill. Neubrig., ut sup.

[4 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 765.

[5 ]Ib.

[6 ]Ib.

[1 ] Guill. Neubrig., ut sup.

[2 ]Ib.

[3 ]Ib.

[1 ]Ib.

[2 ] Gervas. Cantuar., ubi sup.

[3 ] Radulf. de Diceto. col. 691.

[4 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 573. Roger. de Hoveden, p. 765.

[5 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 563. Roger. de Hoveden, loc. supra cit.

[1 ] Iid. ib.—Matth. Paris, i. 181.

[2 ] Gervas. Cantuar., ubi sup. Guill. Neubrig., p. 563.

[3 ] Henric. Knyghton, De eventis Angl., apud Script. Hist. Angl., (Selden) col. 2410.

[4 ] Guill. Neubrig., loc. sup. cit.

[5 ] Matthew Paris, ut sup.

[6 ]Ib.—Roger. de Hoveden, loc. sup. cit.

[7 ]Ib.

[8 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 564.

[1 ] Matth. Paris, loc. sup. cit. Gervas. Cantuar., ubi sup.

[2 ] Matth. Paris, loc. sup. cit.

[3 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 564.

[4 ] Gervas. Cantuar., loc. sup. cit.

[5 ] Henric. Knyghton, ut sup. col. 2412. Guill. Neubrig., p. 567.

[6 ]Ib.—Gervas. Cantuar., col. 1591.

[1 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 267.