le," added the Monarch,
"that what concerns all should be judged of by all." Concerning the
possibility of these members dissenting from his decrees, however, His
Majesty was not quite so eloquent. That contingency was one which a
sovereign in the thirteenth century could scarcely be expected to take
into his august consideration.

But King Edward wanted more money, and apparently preferred to grind it
out of his monks rather than his peasants. He now instituted a search
of all the monasteries in England, and commanded the confiscation of all
cash. The monasteries resisting the excessive taxation laid upon them,
the King seized their lay fees.

In the December of this year, Earl Edmund left Berkhamsted for Cornwall,
taking with him Vivian, and leaving Ademar behind as the only gentleman
in the party. He was going on an errand unpleasant to himself, for the
King had committed to his charge a portion of the Gascon army. War and
contention were altogether out of his line, yet he had no choice but to
obey. He joined his cousin, the Earl of Lancaster, and the Earl of
Lincoln, in Cornwall, and together they sailed on the fifteenth of
January 1296, from a Cornish port termed Plumhupe in the "Chronicle of
Worcester," but not easy to identify now, unless it be taken as a
blunder for Plymouth, and the chronicler be supposed ignorant of its
county. With them were twenty-five barons and a thousand knights.

During the absence of the Earl, it struck his cousin, the King--for no
other reason can be guessed--that the Earl's treasury being much better
filled than his own, he might reasonably pay his debts out of his
cousin's overflowing coffers. Accordingly he sent to Berkhamsted, much
to the dismay of the household, and coolly annexed his cousin's
valuables to the Crown. But Earl Edmund was a man in whose eyes gold
was of comparatively small value, partly because he set other things
much higher, and partly because he had always had so much of it, that
poverty was a trouble which he was scarcely able to realise.

A sad year was 1296 to the royal family of England. The Gascon
expedition proved so disastrous, that Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, died of
grief and disappointment at Bayonne on the fifth of June; and the
Scottish one, though brilliantly successful in a political light, cost
no less, for an arrow shot at a venture, at the siege of Berwick,
quenched the young life of Richard Plantagenet, the only brother and
last ne