we consider you the authors and partners of our victory. Know ye, therefore, that having burnt up the country of the cursed Frederic, we have recovered all those men belonging to us and to the people of Placentia, whom he detained in chains. Fare ye well. Relate this to both our friends and yours, that our joy, which is full, may be made known to all our friends." Moreover, about this time the coinage of England was so intolerably corrupted (as has been said before) by the detestable clippers and falsifiers, that neither natives nor foreigners could look upon it any longer with pleasant eyes or ungrieved hearts ; therefore, provision was made that, without altering the legal weight, or the superscription of letters, the arms of the cross on one side of the penny should be extended in both directions as far as the edge, so that the coin might in this manner be marked off in four divisions. The same year, Walter, surnamed Mauclerc, formerly bishop of Carlisle, but who, after the days of old age and decrepitude came upon him, had assumed the habit of the Preaching Brothers, that he might die poor, paid the debt of nature in a virtuous manner. For he weighed in the scale of sound reason that he had been promoted to the pontifical dignity in a secular and irreligious manner, rather through the influence of the lord the king than from any consideration of his character and learning. This is the man whom fortune often raised up to dash him down more heavily, inasmuch as he incautiously mixed himself up with important and difficult counsels of the king's, which he was not able or willing to fulfil, and managed, both at Pontigny and in the country of Scotland, some marriages which excited the displeasure of the lord the king. By his advice, too, after he had joined the order of Preaching Brothers, it was brought about that a new and previously unheard-of privilege was extorted for their order from the lord the pope, owing, perhaps, to the intervention of money. The same year, the Preaching Brothers procured from the lord the pope a privilege, that it might not be lawful for any brother to quit the order and transfer himself to another, (although it is quite notorious that the order of Saint Benedict is a more strict and excellent order, and entitled, both on account of its antiquity and its author, to higher reverence and dignity than the rule of Saint Augustine, which the Preaching Brothers acknowledge as their standard) ; and