lands im 14ten Jahrhundert_, in
_Sitzungsberichte der Academie der Wissenschaften in Wien_,
philos. histor. classe, cxxxvi., 1897, and, more briefly, in
_Engl. Hist. Review, xi._ (1896), 319-328.

A vigorous opposition to the dominant faction was formed. At its head
was the Black Prince. Hardly less important and much more active than
the dying hero of Poitiers was Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, the
husband of Philippa of Clarence, and the father of the little Roger
Mortimer whom nothing but the uncertain lives of the Prince of Wales
and the sickly Richard of Bordeaux separated from the English throne.
Hereditary antagonism accentuated incompatibility of personal
interests. The ancient feuds of the houses of Mortimer and Lancaster
still lived on in the hostility of their representatives. The
understanding between the Prince of Wales and the Earl of March seems
to have been complete. They had as their most powerful supporters the
outraged dignitaries of the Church, who saw themselves kept out of
office and threatened in their temporalities by the dominant faction.
William of Wykeham, who had been the guardian of the Earl of March
during his long minority, was the most experienced and wary of the
clerical opposition to the lawyers and courtiers of the Lancaster
faction. He had an eager and enthusiastic backer in the young and
high-born Bishop of London, William Courtenay, the son of the Earl of
Devon, and through his mother, Margaret Bohun, a great-grandson of
Edward I. Office and descent combined to make Bishop Courtenay the
custodian of the constitutional tradition, which was equally strong
among the great baronial houses of ancient descent and such highly
placed ecclesiastics as were zealous for the nation as well as for
their order. His support was the more necessary since Simon of Sudbury,
who in 1375 succeeded Whittlesea on the throne of St. Augustine, was a
weak and time-serving politician.

The storm, which had long been brewing, burst at last in the parliament
of April, 1376. Of the acts of this memorable assembly, famous as the
Good Parliament, and of the other concluding troubles of the reign we
are fortunate in possessing not only copious official records, but a
minute and highly dramatic account from the pen of a St. Alban's monk,
who, alone of the monastic chroniclers of his age, represented the
spirit which, in the days of Matthew Paris, made the great
Hertfordshire abbey so famous a school o