on the part of the body of the barons approached them, strictly commanding them not to presume to do this, and forbidding all people to answer any of their enquiries; both because the summonses had not been issued a reasonable number of days beforehand, that is to say forty, and also because, according to the provision, the itinerant justiciaries were not to hold a sitting in any county more than once in seven years. On which account, as their appointment was silently suspended, they presently demanded of the king a reply on this point, and having received his command to desist, they took their way to Northampton with all speed. But in the month of May, all the prelates of England, that is to say, the archbishops, bishops, and abbots, both those who had exemptions and those who had not, and priors, and archdeacons, and the other ordinaries of the churches, having been summoned, as has been said above, to hear the message of the lord the pope, and there to satisfy him with positive answers ; on the Monday before the feast of Saint Dunstan, all the bishops of the southern districts met in London before Boniface, archbishop of Canterbury, and his brother William, whose name has been mentioned before as the nuncio of the lord the pope. And on the Monday following, the bishops of the north country met at Beverly under the archbishop o f York, who had a similar charge committed to him, and a council being held on the before-mentioned points, they provided some new statutes, here and there affecting the state of the English church, which they established, and ordered to be observed with the others which had been previously enacted among the provisions of Oxford. And with respect to these and other articles, and especially to the common provision which was to be made for resisting the Tartars, they determined to send prudent men with full powers to Rome as ambassadors, who should be supported out of their common purse, and who might inform the lord the pope of the answers they had agreed upon in the council above mentioned, which was to be held at Borne. These men (as is generally said) then swore, in the presence of the bishops before mentioned, that they would not patiently allow anything England in commemoration of the expulsion of the Danes by king Ethelred, in the year 1002, when he made a great massacre of them, and drove them out of England. The massacre itself, however, took place on Sunday, November 13, $aint Brice's day.