and enlarging with rich gifts St. Edmund's resting-
place, which had become a city of refuge for many things, this
Earl of Essex flatly defrauded him, by violence or quirk of law,
of five shillings yearly, and converted said sum to his own poor
uses! Nay, in another case of litigation, the unjust Standard
bearer, for his own profit, asserting that the cause belonged not
to St. Edmund's Court, but to _his_ in Lailand Hundred, 'involved
us in travelings and innumerable expenses, vexing the servants of
St. Edmund for a long tract of time: In short, he is without
reverence for the Heavenly, this Standard-bearer; reveres only
the Earthly, Gold-coined; and has a most morbid lamentable flaw
in the texture of him. It cannot come to, good.

Accordingly, the same flaw, or St.-Vitus' _tic,_ manifests itself
ere long in another way. In the year 1157, he went with his
Standard to attend King Henry, our blessed Sovereign (whom _we_
saw afterwards at Waltham), in his War with the Welsh. A
somewhat disastrous War; in which while King Henry and his force
were struggling to retreat Parthian-like, endless clouds of
exasperated Welshmen hemming them in, and now we had come to the
'difficult pass of Coleshill,' and as it were to the nick of
destruction,--Henry Earl of Essex shrieks out on a sudden
(blinded doubtless by his inner flaw, or 'evil genius' as some
name it), That King Henry is killed, That all is lost,--and
flings down his Standard to shift for itself there! And,
certainly enough, all _had_ been lost, had all men been as he;--
had not brave men, without such miserable jerking _tic-
douloureux_ in the souls of them, come dashing up, with blazing
swords and looks, and asserted That nothing was lost yet, that
all must be regained yet. In this manner King Henry and his
force got safely retreated, Parthian-like, from the pass of
Coleshill and the Welsh War.* But, once home again, Earl Robert
de Montfort, a kinsman of this Standard-bearer's, rises up in the
King's Assembly to declare openly that such a man is unfit for
bearing English Standards, being in fact either a special
traitor, or something almost worse, a coward namely, or universal
traitor. Wager of Battle in consequence; solemn Duel, by the
King's appointment, 'in a certain Island of the Thames-stream at
Reading, _apud Radingas,_ short way from the Abbey there. King,
Peers, and an immense multitude of people, on such scaffoldings
and heights as they can come