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MATTHEW OF WESTMINSTER
The flowers of history, especially such as relate to the affairs of Britain. Vol. II. A.D. 1066 to A.D. I307.

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MATTHEW OF WESTMINSTER
The flowers of history, especially such as relate to the affairs of Britain. Vol. II. A.D. 1066 to A.D. I307.
page 159



of Essex died, to the grief and lamentation of all men, a youth of the greatest liberality and munificence in making presents. After this event, the king, who was by this time behaving tyrannically, came to London, where he attacked the citizens with a cruel calumny, saying, that they, to his great injury, had given to Louis, king of France, who was now dead, (and whom they had for a long time cherished in their bosoms, as it were, as an enemy to him), five thousand marks of silver at his departure. On which account the same citizens were compelled, by the advice of evil councillors, to pay the king the same sum of money, which was not done without the sighs and curses of many men. And he took from them likewise the fifteenth part of all their moveables and of all their substance, which had been formerly granted to him throughout all England. And from the burgesses of Northampton he took twelve hundred pounds as an aid, besides the fifteenth which all men universally paid throughout the whole kingdom of England, without any profit or increase of the kingdom following. Likewise all men of the religious orders, and all beneficed clerks were compelled to give the fifteenth of all their goods, both of ecclesiastical and lay property ; nor did the appeal to the lord pope, which was interposed, do them any good, because it was suggested to the pope, on the king's part, that that collection was made for the restoration of the Kingdom of England, which care appeared now to belong particularly to him ; and so he, who it had been hoped would have turned out a shepherd and a father, became an ally of the wolves against his own natural flock. Eia, countess of Salisbury, the widow of William Longsword, transferred the Carthusian monks, who had been placed by her husband at Heythrop, to Hinton, in the diocese of Bath. The same year, when the king was now easy on the subject of the fifteenth that was paid or was to be paid, having convened a council at Oxford,- in the month of February, he gave notice before them all that he was now of legal age, so that being for the future released from guardianship, he should himself take the chief part in regulating his royal affairs ; and so he, who at first had as a governor and guardian, William Marischal, as long as he lived, and after his death, Peter, bishop of Winchester, now shook off the counsels of Hubert de Burgh, the justiciary of the kingdom, and discarded the advice and the authority of the bishops and of his friends, who


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