by the French
pensions which were then accepted by king Edward and his ministers.
Thenceforward, any hope of recovering the English provinces of France was
indefinitely deferred; the very echoes of those martial glories which had
once made the English name so dreadful in that country were allowed to die
away; the dreams of conquest were dissipated; and the hands of Englishmen
again turned to internecine contests, which resulted in the total
destruction of the royal house of Plantagenet, and the ruin of a large
proportion of the ancient nobility.

THE BOKE OF NOBLESSE, after the total failure of those more generous
sentiments and aspirations which it was intended to propagate, at once
became, what it is now, a mere mirror of by-gone days; and, considering
these circumstances, we cannot be surprised that it was never again
transcribed, nor found its way to the press.

It is with regret that I relinquish to some future more fortunate inquirer
the discovery of the author of this composition. The manuscript from which
it is printed is certainly not his autograph original; for its great
inaccuracy occasionally renders the meaning almost unintelligible. And yet
the corrections and insertions, which I have indicated as coming _a secunda
manu_, would seem to belong to the author.

I have already, in the first page of this Introduction, intimated the
possibility of the work having been composed in the lifetime of sir John
Fastolfe, and merely re-edited, if we may use the term, upon occasion of
the projected invasion of France in 1475. There are three circumstances
which decidedly connect the book with some dependent of sir John
Fastolfe:--

1. That the writer quotes sir John as "mine autour," or informant, in pp.
16 and 64, as well as tells other anecdotes which were probably received
from his relation.

2. His having access to sir John's papers or books of account (p. 68); and

3. There being still preserved in the volume, bound up with its fly-leaves,
the two letters, probably both addressed to Fastolfe, and one of them
certainly so, which are printed hereafter, as an Appendix to these remarks.

Sir John Fastolfe is not commemorated as having been a patron of
literature. In the inventory of his property which is printed in the
twentieth volume of the Archaeologia, no books occur except a few missals,
&c. belonging to his chapel. Though William of Worcestre, now famous for
his historical collections, (which have been edit