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persecution. The natural supposition is that this chosen companion knew too much to be allowed to live after he and so many others had quarrelled with the king. In 1210 he managed to escape to France; in 1211 he died and he was buried at Corbeil on the eve of St. Lawrence.2 All this we know apart from the evidence of Margam.

Now by far the most conspicuous person in the annals of Margam, and one of the most important figures in its records, is this William of Briouze. He was lord of Brecon, Radnor, and Gower. Between 1202 and 1207 he was responsible for the administration of Glamorgan, in which Margam lay. He attests the charters of local benefactors

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to the abbey. In the annals we are told how William of Briouze was chiefly responsible for John's accession to the throne in spite of his previous condemnation. Except the great semi-official chronicler, Roger of Howden, the Margam annalist is the only writer to mention this condemnation of John at the court of King Richard. He is interested in William's life and alone tells us that after his death in France he was buried by the exile Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury. Finally, the relations of John and William were a theme of popular tradition in South Wales nearly eighty years after the death of Arthur. On February 1203 John had granted the land of Gower to William. In 1279 the earl of Warwick contested the right of William's descendant to this honour, and especially to

1. Calendar of Documents relating to Ireland, i, no. 408.

2. Rog. Wendover, ii, 59; Matthew Paris, Chron. Mai., ii, 532; Annales Monastici, v, 40, and index.

3. See John's charter of 3rd June, 1200, in Clark (iii, 177), and the extent of 1235 (iii, 381); also Rot. Litt. Pat., p. 19 (23rd October, 1202), and p. 68b (1207).

4. Clark, iii, 144, 217. In 1193 William attested a charter of John, then count of Mortain, at Cardiff (i, 33). An interesting charter of Robert, son of Wian, granted to the abbey a lease of land for six years from Michaelmas, 1197, "que videlicet festivitas Sancti Michaelis tercia secuta est captionem castelli de Sancto Claro factam per Willelmum de Brausa" (iii, 169).

5. Ann. Monast., i, 24.

the castle of Swansea, on several grounds, including the significant plea that William had extorted the original charter from John when the king was in a panic and feared that his companion was going to leave him. In short, the man who was most in John's confidence was William of Briouze, and if any chronicler was likely to hear about the death of Arthur and its consequences it was the chronicler of Margam.

There is another significant fact which, so far as I know, has never been noticed, but which adds an element of certainty to this view. It has often been observed that the Margam story only reappears in one place—and there with some variation-in the epic, Philippid, of King Philip's chaplain William the Breton. The variations are not great, and show that the chaplain was giving the same story independently. Now it is very curious that he singles out William of Briouze, who is not mentioned elsewhere in the poem, as the spokesman of those barons who were with John near Rouen at the time of Arthur's death. John brought Arthur to Rouen (I summarise the flowery verses) and aroused the suspicions of the barons. William of Briouze declared that he would be responsible for him no longer, and that he handed him over safe and sound. After a moody seclusion at the royal manor of Moulineux, John did away with his nephew at Rouen by night. This comes in book vi., which with the beginning of book vii. has been shown with some probability to have been composed before 1214.3 Now part of this story at least had been well known or suspected at the French court for a long time. The abbot of Coggeshall tells us that Philip heard in 1204 that Arthur had been drowned and 1. P.R.O., K.R. Miscell. Books, vol. i, p. 478b, 8 Edw. I.; printed in Clark, iii, 532.

2. Philippid, vi, 470-564.

3. Delaborde, Notice sur Rigord et Guillaume le Breton (prefixed to his edition), pp. 70 seqq. The references to Arthur's death in William's Continuation of Rigord are brief and casual, though emphatic (ed. Delaborde, i, 253, 293).

the abbot wrote before 1207. Yet, on the other hand, as William the Breton wrote his poem in three years, this part could not have been composed much earlier than 1214, in any case after the flight of William of Briouze to France. He was in almost constant attendance upon Philip, and likely to hear what was going on. He would be interested in the famous fugitive who had experienced such a turn of fortune and fled like a beggar from the English coast. Is it not possible that at last the full story of the murder was known at the French court, and that in the Philippid we get the tale-naturally favourable to William of Briouze-which is found elsewhere only in the chronicle of a Welsh abbey? This would partly account for the terror and atrocities of John during these years, for the alliance between Philip and the English barons, and for the projected invasion. It would be tempting to suggest that it was then that Philip summoned John to appear for his crime; but this is impossible.

This analysis has, I think, enabled us to form a juster idea of the value of the Margam chronicle, and to trace to some extent the origin of the most detailed account which has come down to us of Arthur's death. I have maintained that the Margam narrative is to be regarded as a whole, and therefore, unless very serious evidence were brought against it, we are forced to the belief that Philip's court probably did condemn John a second time. Louis' proctor in 1216 said he was condemned to death; the Margam chronicle and later tradition are content to say that he was sentenced to lose all his continental possessions. It is quite possible that, after the revelations and awful crimes of 1210, when John was excommunicated, and Philip had been urged by the pope to deprive him entirely, Philip's court had proceeded to a sentence of death. The language used in 1216 suggests that the repudiation of allegiance by the English barons followed the French judgment after no very long interval. Still, this is only possible. What seems impossible is that Louis told a lie

in 1216 and that the annals of Margam, the tradition in Brittany, and the independent testimony of Matthew Paris are at fault. With the argument that the condemnation must have taken place in 1203 I have dealt already; it depends on the partly erroneous belief of our authorities that it caused the loss of Normandy. Yet everybody would agree that the death of Arthur gave strength to the French king, and if so a formal sentence of confiscation, as soon as he was sure of Arthur's death, would strengthen him much more. The other arguments against the condemnation are negative the late and unsatisfactory nature of the authorities and the silence of the chief records and chronicles. But we have seen that the annals of Margam are not so very unsatisfactory after all. There is very late testimony to the condemnation, which has been rejected by M. Petit-Dutaillis with some contumely. This is the marginal note inserted by Matthew Paris in the documents preserved by Roger of Wendover. Matthew breaks in to tell the true story. What really happened, he says, was this: King John sent the bishop of Ely and Hubert de Burgh to Philip to say that he was ready to stand a trial, but Philip insisted on his presence without a safe-conduct. The embassy replied that, even if the duke of Normandy could attend, the king of England could hardly do so without a guarantee of safety. And so the magnates Francie proceeded to condemn him unjustly in his absence. It is probable that this late story is not quite true. Eustace of Ely was certainly one of the embassy of 1204, and may have been sent on a special errand as well. That Hubert de Burgh went is not so likely.2 But the story is not to be dismissed summarily because Matthew Paris 1. Revue Historique, lxxi (1899), p. 35.

2. Chron. Mai., ii, 658. For Eustace, bishop of Ely, see Coggeshall (p. 144), whose narrative is not at all a bad parallel to Matthew Paris. Hubert de Burgh was at this time custodian of Chinon, but it is quite possible that he was engaged in another capacity in the early months of Note how studiously vague the Marshal's biographer is about the proposals of peace (iii, 176).

1204.

sometimes makes a blunder; for it clearly represents an independent tradition-independent, that is, of the document of 1216-and therefore corroborates, so far as it is worth anything, the Margam annals.1

III.

I should say a word about the last important argument used by M. Bémont and his followers, the argument from silence. It may be admitted that this is invalid so far as the chroniclers were concerned; if the murder passed unrecorded, the condemnation obviously would also; but what about the French registers and the papal registers; and why did not William the Breton, who says so much about Arthur, enlarge upon the condemnation? But the French registers were not kept systematically like the English records, and there is no mention of any condemnation upon them or in Philip's charters. Philip wrote about the first trial to the pope, but our only authority is the pope's answer; no official record would tell us anything. The French court of' peers' was like the English curia regisin its broadest sense-in this, that its proceedings could pass unnoticed by the ordinary man if they were not recorded. John's trial after Richard's return passed almost unnoticed in England. Everything was very informal, and the trial of John is really of importance to the French historian and jurist because it seems to suggest

1. Since this article appeared in the English Historical Review, it has occurred to me that Matthew Paris may have been confusing his dates, and be really describing the negotiations which preceded the admitted condemnation in 1202 (above, p. 219). The bishop of Ely, as John's letters show (Rot. Pat., 10b) was one of John's spokesmen with Philip, and at this very time Hubert de Burgh was evidently in high favour with the king, and entrusted with important tasks (Rot. Pat., 6b, 7b, 9, 9b, 11). If this view be correct, it is of course impossible to use the passage in Matthew Paris in support of a second condemnation. But I prefer the view that the chronicler is correctly referring to the year 1204.

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