Some of the king's counselors remonstrated with him against
this wasteful policy, but he replied that he needed money so much for
the crusade, that, if necessary, he would sell the city of London
itself to raise it, if he could only find a man rich enough to be the
purchaser.

After having raised as much money as he could by the sale of the royal
lands, the next resource to which Richard turned was the sale of
public offices and titles of honor. He looked about the country for
wealthy men, and he offered them severally high office on condition of
their paying large sums of money into the treasury as a consideration
for them. He sold titles of nobility, too, in the same way. If any man
who was not rich held a high or important office, he would find some
pretext for removing him, and then would offer the office for sale.
One of the historians of those times says that at this period
Richard's presence-chamber became a regular place of trade--like the
counting-room of a merchant or an exchange--where every thing that
could be derived from the bounty of the crown or bestowed by the royal
prerogative was offered for sale in open market to the man who would
give the best bargain for it.

Another of the modes which the king adopted for raising money, and in
some respects the worst of all, was to impose fines as a punishment
for crime, and then, in order to make the fines produce as much as
possible, every imaginable pretext was resorted to to charge wealthy
persons with offenses, with a view of exacting large sums from them as
the penalty. It was said that a great officer of state was charged
with some offense, and was put in prison and not released until he had
paid a fine of three thousand pounds.

One of the worst of these cases was that of his half-brother Geoffrey,
the son of Rosamond. Geoffrey had been appointed Archbishop of York in
accordance with the wish that his father Henry had expressed on his
death-bed. Richard pretended to be displeased with this. Perhaps he
wished to have had that office to dispose of like the rest. At any
rate, he exacted a very large sum from Geoffrey as the condition on
which he would "grant him his peace," as he termed it, and Geoffrey
paid the money.

When, by these and other similar means, Richard had raised all that he
could in England, he prepared to cross the Channel into Normandy, in
order to see what more he could do there. Before he went, however, he
had first to make arrangemen