of Worcester. This year, Philip, bishop of Durham, and Geoffrey de Muschamp, Bishop of Chester, and William de Warenne, died. The same year, queen Isabella bore king John a son, who was called Richard ; so that when the time of her child-bearing was accomplished, the child was born on the vigil of the Epiphany, in the year next following, and this circumstance gives rise to many contradictions in history. The bishop of Chester was succeeded by William de Cornehull, archdeacon of Huntingdon, and the bishop of Durham by Richard de Marisco. This year, Philip, duke of Swabia, who had been a competitor, with Otho, for the empire, was murdered. The king ordered all the property of the monks to be confiscated, because of the interdict. At the beginning of the interdict the white monks desisted from the performance of their duties, but afterwards, at the command of their abbot, they ventured to celebrate divine service. But when this boldness of theirs had come to the ears of the supreme pontiff, they, to their greater confusion, were suspended anew by a fresh sentence. About the same time, king John, fearing lest the pope should become more violent, so as to excommunicate him himself by name, and absolve all who held under him from their loyalty and fealty to him, caused all those who he at all suspected, to swear fealty to him, and took special hostages from them. But the more powerful nobles, when the king demanded hostages from them, refused them to his face, saying, " How can we expect him to preserve our sons and dear relations, who are not at all akin to him, unhurt, when he wickedly slew with his own hand his own nephew, by that kind of death which is called murder ?" In the meantime the king kept on oppressing one or other of the nobles of the kingdom, either by extorting money from them unjustly, or by stripping them of their privileges or properties ; of some he seduced the wives, or deflowered the daughters, so that he became manifestly and notoriously odious and detestable both to God and man. Moreover, that his insatiable avarice and unappeasable gluttony and licentiousness might be concealed from no one, he prohibited all fowling and taking of winged game, and prevented the nobles from hunting, by which measures he not only lost the affections of all men, but incurred their unextinguishable hatred ; so that even his own wife detested and loathed him ; whom he, though an adulterer