rately concealing its uneasiness, until it should be possible for it, at a convenient time for cure, to cast out the whole cause of the disease at once and once for all.
Sect. 4. Not without the anxious solicitude and amazement of many, a bat was seen, in the middle and bright part of the day, to flutter through the monastery, inconveniently recircling in the same tracks, and especially around the king's throne.
Sect. 5. William de Longchamp, who had been the chancellor of the earl of Poitiers before his accession, when the earl was crowned king, considered his office to have profited as much for the better, as a kingdom is superior to an earldom.
Sect. 6. A circumstance happened on the selfsame day of the coronation in Westminster Abbey, a presage of such portentous omen, as then was hardly allowable to be related even in a whisper. At Complin, the last hour of the day, the first peal that day happened to be rung, neither by any agreement, nor even the ministers of the church themselves being aware of it, till after it was done; for Prime, Tierce, Sext, Nones, and the solemn service of vespers and two masses were celebrated without any ringing of peals.
Sect. 7. Stephen de Marzia,[1] seneschal of Anjou, under the king lately deceased, he great and mighty, singularly fierce, and the master of his lord, being taken and cast into chains, was dragged to Winchester, where being made a gazing-stock to angels and to men, emaciated with woeful hunger, and broken with the weight of his irons, he was constrained to the payment of thirty thousand pounds of money of Anjou, and the promise of fifteen thousand pounds, for his ransom. Ralph de Glanville, jnsticiary of the realm of England and the king's eye, a man not inferior to Stephen, except in manners and riches, being deprived of authority and given into custody, redeemed merely his liberty to go and come for fifteen thousand pounds of silver. And whereas this name, Glanville, had been so great the day before, a name as it were above every name, so that whosoever, to whom it should be given by the Lord, would converse among princes, and would be adored by the people, yet the next morning there remained not one in the land who could be called by this name. That
- ↑ Stephen de Marzia, otherwise called Stephen de Turonis.
