is second rebellion did not provoke the king to
any act of cruelty; and the earl of Glocester himself escaped with total
impunity. He was only obliged to enter into a bond of twenty thousand
marks, that he should never again be guilty of rebellion; a strange
method of enforcing the laws, and a proof of the dangerous independence
of the barons in those ages! These potent nobles were, from the danger
of the precedent, averse to the execution of the laws of forfeiture and
felony against any of their fellows; though they could not, with a
good grace, refuse to concur in obliging them to fulfil any voluntary
contract and engagement into which they had entered.

{1270.} The prince, finding the state of the kingdom tolerably composed,
was seduced by his avidity for glory, and by the prejudices of the
age, as well as by the earnest solicitations of the king of France, to
undertake an expedition against the infidels in the Holy Land;[*] and he
endeavored previously to settle the state in such a manner, as to dread
no bad effects from his absence. As the formidable power and turbulent
disposition of the earl of Glocester gave him apprehensions, he insisted
on carrying him along with him, in consequence of a vow which that
nobleman had made to undertake the same voyage: in the mean time, he
obliged him to resign some of his castles, and to enter into a new bond
not to disturb the peace of the kingdom.[**]

* M. Paris, p. 677

** Chron. T. Wykes, p. 90.

He sailed from England with an army; and arrived in Lewis's camp before
Tunis in Africa, where he found that monarch already dead, from the
intemperance of the climate and the fatigues of his enterprise. The
great, if not only weakness of this prince, in his government, was
the imprudent passion for crusades; but it was this zeal chiefly that
procured him from the clergy the title of St. Lewis, by which he is
known in the French history and if that appellation had not been so
extremely prostituted as to become rather a term of reproach, he seems,
by his uniform probity and goodness, as well as his piety, to have fully
merited the title. He was succeeded by his son Philip, denominated
the Hardy; a prince of some merit, though much inferior to that of his
father.

{1271.} Prince Edward, not discouraged by this event, continued his
voyage to the Holy Land, where he signalized himself by acts of valor;
revived the glory of the English name in those parts; and struck such