A.D. 1211.] WELS H ritl.VCES SUBDUED. 2.:.-j prelates of England to meet in his presence. To this general assembly there came abbats, priests, abbesses, templars, hospitallers, the governors of vills, of the order of t.'luny, and of other foreign districts, men of every rank and order, and they were all compelled to pay such heavy ransoms, and to make so great an expenditure of the church property, that the amount of the money extorted is said to have exceeded a hundred thousand pounds sterling ; the white monks, too, of the kingdom of England, exclusive of the rest, after being deprived of their privileges, were compelled to pay forty thousand pounds of silver to the king in this taxation. In this year, too, the noblewoman Matilda, wife of William do Brause, and her son and heir William, with his wile, who had been imprisoned at Windsor by order of the English king, died of starvation at that place. Haw the king of England subdued the Welsh princes. Λ. n. 1*211. At Christmas, king John was at York in company with the earls and barons of his kingdom ; and in this year, too, the said king collected a large army at Whitchurch, and marched iuto Wales on the eighth of July, and penetrated in great force into the interior of that country as far as Snowdon, destroying all the places he came to; he, subdued all the princes and nobles without opposition, and received twenty-eight hostages for their submission for the future. After these successes he returned, on the day of St. Mary's Assumption, to Whitchurch, from which place he went to Northampton, and there he met two messengers with letters from our lord the pope, namely l'andulph, a subdeacon and a cardinal of the apostolic see, anil Durand, a brother of the knights of the Temple, who had come for the purpose of restoring peace between the king and the priesthood. The king, after advising with the messengers, willingly granted permission for the archbishop of Canterbury and the monks, as well as all the proscribed bishops, to return to their homes in peace; but as he refused to make good to the archbishop and bishops the losses they had sustained, or to satisfy them for their property which had been confiscated, the messengers returned to France without concluding the business. King John, after this, levied a tux on the knights who had not been with the army in Wales, of two marks of