laise
to Rouen and confining him, more strictly than ever, in the citadel.

Thenceforth Arthur disappears from history. What was his end no one
knows. The chronicle of the Abbey of Margan in South Wales, a
chronicle of which the only known manuscript ends with the year 1232,
and of which the portion dealing with the early years of John's reign
was not compiled in its present form till after 1221 at earliest,
asserts that on Maunday Thursday (April 3, 1203), John, "after dinner,
being drunk and possessed by the devil," slew his nephew with his own
hand and tied a great stone to the body, which he flung into the
Seine; that a fisherman's net brought it up again, and that, being
recognized, it was buried secretly, "for fear of the tyrant," in the
Church of Notre Dame des Pres, near Rouen. William the Breton, in his
poem on Philip Augustus, completed about 1216, relates in detail, but
without date, how John took Arthur out alone with him by night in a
boat on the Seine, plunged a sword into his body, rowed along for
three miles with the corpse, and then threw it overboard. Neither of
these writers gives any authority for his story. The earliest
authority of precisely ascertained date to which we can trace the
assertion that Arthur was murdered was a document put forth by a
personage whose word, on any subject whatever, is as worthless as the
word of John himself--King Philip Augustus of France. In 1216--about
the time when his Breton historiographer's poem was completed--Philip
affected to regard it as a notorious fact that John had, either in
person or by another's hand, murdered his nephew. But Philip at the
same time went on to assert that John had been summoned to trial
before the supreme court of France, and by it condemned to forfeiture
of all his dominions, on that same charge of murder; and this latter
assertion is almost certainly false. Seven months after the date
assigned by the Margan annalist to Arthur's death--in October,
1203--Philip owned himself ignorant whether the Duke of Brittany were
alive or not.[34] Clearly, therefore, it was not as the avenger of
Arthur's murder that Philip took the field at the end of April. On the
other hand, Philip had never made the slightest attempt to obtain
Arthur's release; early in 1203, if not before, he was almost openly
laying his plans in anticipation of Arthur's permanent effacement from
politics.

The interests of the French King were in fact no less concerned in
Ar