king, piqued at this and the like speeches, collected a large army, and when the crops in the fields, the grapes in the vineyards, and the fruit in the orchards were plentiful, he invaded France cruelly, and burnt and laid waste all the country; nothing could appease the anger of the excited king, so that he revenged the insult offered him, at the cost of many. Finally, he set fire to,. and burnt, the city of Mantes, with the church of St. Mary there, in which were burnt two nuns, who thought that their sanctuary ought not to be left even at such an emergency ; at which deed, the king exulting, whilst urging on his soldiers to give fuel to the flames, incurred a disease by approaching too near the fire, and from the heat and changeableness of the autumnal season. The anguish of his disease was moreover increased by his horse falling whilst leaping over a broken ditch, which accident caused an internal rupture to the rider; from the pain of this the king suffered so much that he returned to Rouen. His weakness daily increasing, he took to his bed, being driven to it by the urgency of his disease : physicians were consulted, who on examination of his urinals foretold certain death. Having, however, recovered his strength a little, he performed the duties of a Christian at the confession and viaticum; he bequeathed Normandy to his son Robert, England to William Rufus, and his maternal possessions with money to Henry ; he ordered all those imprisoned by him to be liberated from custody and indemnified, and caused money to be brought and distributed amongst the churches ; and assigned to the cathedral of the holy Mary, lately burnt by him, a sufficient sum of money to rebuild it.' Having then duly arranged his affairs, on the eighth day before the ides ( 13th) of September he departed this life, in the twenty-second year of his reign, the fifty-second of his dukedom, the fifty-ninth of his life, and the thousand and eighty-seventh year of the incarnation of our Lord. His dead body was brought by way of the Seine to Caen, and there buried in the presence of a large concourse of prelates. Robert his first-born son, at the time his father died, rebelled against him in Normandy. William Rufus, before his father had expired, crossed the sea to England, thinking this would be more useful to him in the sequel than to be present at the obsequies of his father's burial ; Henry was the only one