ved down these
slopes to an attack. His men with white crosses on back and breast knelt in
prayer before the battle opened, and all but reached the town before their
approach was perceived. Edward however opened the fight by a furious charge
which broke the Londoners on Leicester's left. In the bitterness of his
hatred for the insult to his mother he pursued them for four miles,
slaughtering three thousand men. But he returned to find the battle lost.
Crowded in the narrow space between the heights and the river Ouse, a space
broken by marshes and by the long street of the town, the royalist centre
and left were crushed by Earl Simon. The Earl of Cornwall, now King of the
Romans, who, as the mocking song of the victors ran, "makede him a castel
of a mulne post" ("he weened that the mill-sails were mangonels" goes on
the sarcastic verse), was taken prisoner, and Henry himself captured.
Edward cut his way into the Priory only to join in his father's surrender.

[Sidenote: Simon's rule]

The victory of Lewes placed Earl Simon at the head of the state. "Now
England breathes in the hope of liberty," sang a poet of the time; "the
English were despised like dogs, but now they have lifted up their head and
their foes are vanquished." But the moderation of the terms agreed upon in
the Mise of Lewes, a convention between the king and his captors, shows
Simon's sense of the difficulties of his position. The question of the
Provisions was again to be submitted to arbitration; and a parliament in
June, to which four knights were summoned from every county, placed the
administration till this arbitration was complete in the hands of a new
council of nine to be nominated by the Earls of Leicester and Gloucester
and the patriotic Bishop of Chichester. Responsibility to the community was
provided for by the declaration of a right in the body of barons and
prelates to remove either of the Three Electors, who in turn could displace
or appoint the members of the Council. Such a constitution was of a
different order from the cumbrous and oligarchical committees of 1258. But
it had little time to work in. The plans for a fresh arbitration broke
down. Lewis refused to review his decision, and all schemes for setting
fresh judges between the king and his people were defeated by a formal
condemnation of the barons' cause issued by the Pope. Triumphant as he was
indeed Earl Simon's difficulties thickened every day. The queen with
Archbishop Bo