John.

The monks throw great reproaches on this prince for his impiety, and
even infidelity; and as an instance of it, they tell us that, having
one day caught a very fat stag, he exclaimed, "How plump and well fed
is this animal! and yet I dare swear he never heard mass." This sally of
wit upon the usual corpulency of the priests, more than all his enormous
crimes and iniquities, made him pass with them for an atheist.

John left two legitimate sons behind him, Henry, born on the first of
October, 1207, and now nine years of age; and Richard, born on the
sixth of January, 1209; and three daughters, Jane, afterwards married
to Alexander, king of Scots; Eleanor, married first to William Mareschal
the younger, earl of Pembroke, and then to Simon Mountfort earl of
Leicester; and Isabella, married to the emperor Frederic II. All these
children were born to him by Isabella of Angouleme, his second wife.
His illegitimate children were numerous; but none of them were anywise
distinguished.

It was this king who, in the ninth year of his reign, first gave by
charter to the city of London, the right of electing annually a mayor
out of its own body, an office which was till now held for life. He gave
the city also power to elect and remove its sheriffs at pleasure, and
its common-council men annually. London bridge was finished in this
reign: the former bridge was of wood. Maud, the empress, was the first
that built a stone bridge in England.

APPENDIX II.

THE FEUDAL AND ANGLO-NORMAN GOVERNMENT AND MANNERS.

The feudal law is the chief foundation both of the political government
and of the jurisprudence established by the Normans in England. Our
subject therefore requires that we should form a just idea of this law,
in order to explain the state, as well of that kingdom, as of all other
kingdoms of Europe, which during those ages were governed by similar
institutions. And though I am sensible that I must here repeat many
observations and reflections which have been communicated by others, yet
as every book, agreeably to the observation of a great historian, should
be as complete as possible within itself, and should never refer for
any thing material to other books, it will be necessary in this place
to deliver a short plan of that prodigious fabric, which for several
centuries preserved such a mixture of liberty and oppression, order and
anarchy, stability and revolution, as was never experienced in any oth