land for thirty-four years.

"His mother was Eleanora of Aquitaine, who was, in her day, the
prettiest girl in France. But she was a wilful little woman and full
of craft. She married the French king first, but, not liking him on
account of his monkish ways, she procured a divorce, and told Henry
Plantagenet, who was young and handsome and gay, that she would like
to marry him. He accepted the proposal, because the union would add to
his dominions several provinces. Henry loved Rosamond Clifford,--'Fair
Rosamond,'--whom he had met in the valley of the Wye, and who was the
prettiest girl in all the world.

"The marriage proved an unhappy one. Henry soon discovered what a
wily, wilful little woman she was; he tried to curb her, and a
terrible time he had.

"Richard succeeded his father. It was he who made the grandest crusade
of the Middle Ages; who was married at Cyprus in flower-time; who
fought with noble Saladin at Acre and Jaffa; who was obliged to sail
away from the Holy Land; who looked back from his beautiful ship on
the unconquered coast with regret; who was shipwrecked and cast upon a
hostile coast; and who was discovered, when imprisoned in a gloomy old
castle on the Danube, by the harp of Blondel the Troubadour.

"Then came John, in whose veins flowed the worst blood of King Henry's
family. Prince Arthur, Geoffrey's son, had the best claim to the
crown, but somehow John got himself crowned, and he began to reign so
terribly that the hearts of the barons quaked within them; and so, for
a time, he silenced all opposition. He was as cunning as bad Queen
Eleanora, and he loved to make mischief as well. He would order that a
man should be killed, apparently with as little conscience as he would
have ordered a butcher to slay a sheep. Most bad kings have been
notable for some good qualities; King John, so far as I know, had
none.

"In Nottinghamshire there is an old town, removed from the great
centres of life and activity, called Gotham. The inhabitants were of
good Saxon stock, and they hated the whole race of Norman
Plantagenets. These people had learned something of liberty from bold
Robin Hood, 'all under the greenwood tree.'

"One day there came a report to Old Gotham that King John was making a
progress, and would pass through the town. Now it was an old custom in
feudal times that the course that a king took, in passing for the
first time through a district or a shire, should become ever after a
publ