polating for the safety of their persons, and arms, and possessions. In the meantime, England was afflicted with severe affliction, the wives of the nobles being given up to the sport of the soldiery, their houses being burnt, their woods cut down, their lands given away to foreigners, and money extorted from every one by exquisite torments. In the meantime, the barons lay inactive in London, doing nothing, except at times driving away into the neighbouring places the flocks and herds of poor men, and carrying off their masters as their booty, in a merciless manner. But, while they were thus inactive, the king did not desist from daily reducing their castles, and towns, and dependents, and estates, under hie own powers. In like manner, too, his guards, who were stationed in different parte, ravaged and destroyed the possessions of all the barons. But the king, after he had laid waste and subjugated all the northern districts of England, suddenly invaded the territories of the king of Scotland, who had shown himself a favourer of the barons, and made himself master, by force, of the castle of Berwick, and some others, which were believed to be impregnable. And he would have spread slaughter and destruction very widely in those parts, if a great necessity, which did not admit of delay, had not suddenly recalled him, as will be shown hereafter. And while these things were going on, at the pressing request of the king, who was frequently sending messengers to the pope as his lord, the supreme pontiff, in order that he, as a new master, might give a vigorous and effectual protection to his new vassal, now, a second time, excommunicated by name and individually the barons of England, whom he had previously excommunicated in the lump. About this time, the isle of Ely was laid waste by Falcos, who also, mounted on his horse with his sword drawn, irreverently entered the cathedral itself, and dragging from thence noblemen, and matrons, and clergymen, and the lord Stephen Ridel himself, a noble of the most illustrious character, an honourable and munificent man, he compelled him to pay a most heavy ransom. The barons being now in a strait, as they found that the lord the pope, who was formerly their defender, was now become a vigorous persecutor of them, because of the submission of the kingdom to him, and the vassalage under which the humbled monarch had placed himself, were in daily expectation of the arrival of Louis, the eldest son of Philip,