Loathsome animals were eaten; and it was even said that parents
were forced to keep a strict watch over their children, lest they should
be stolen and devoured.
While the King and Queen were banquetting at Westminster, at
Whitsuntide, 1317, a masked lady rode into the hall on horseback, and
delivered a letter to the King. Imagining it to be some sportive
challenge or gay compliment, he ordered that it should be read aloud;
but it proved to be a direful lamentation over the state of England, and
an appeal to him to rouse himself from his pleasures and attend to the
good of his people. The bearer was at once pursued and seized, when she
confessed that she had been sent by a knight; and he, on being summoned,
asked pardon, saying he had not expected that the letter would be read
in public, but that he deemed it the only means of drawing the King's
attention to the miseries of his people. It may be feared that the
letter met with the fate of Jeremiah's roll.
A cloud was already rising in the West, which seemed small and
trifling, but which was fraught with bitter hatred and envy, ere long to
burst in a storm upon the heads of the King and his friends. The first
seeds of strife were sown by the dishonesty of a knight on the borders
of Wales, one William de Breos. He began his career by trying to cheat
his stepmother of her dower of eight hundred marks; and when the law
decided against him, he broke out into such unseemly language against
the judge, that he was sentenced to walk bareheaded from the King's
Bench to the Exchequer to ask pardon, and then committed to the Tower.
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