h from _Robin Hood_ to _The Black Arrow_.
The Fitzwarins, as concerns their personalities and genealogies, may be
surrendered without a pang to the historian, though he shall not have
the marrow of the story. They never seem to have been quite happy except
when they were in a state of "utlagation," and it was not only John
against whom they rebelled, for one of them died on the Barons' side at
Lewes.

The compiler, whoever he was--it has been said already and cannot be
said too often, that every recompiler in the Middle Ages felt it (like
the man in that "foolish" writer, as some call him, Plato) a sacred duty
to add something to the common stock,--was not exactly a master of his
craft, but certainly showed admirable zeal. There never was a more
curious _macedoine_ than this story. Part of it is, beyond all doubt,
traditional history, with place-names all right, though distorted by
that curious inability to transpronounce or trans-spell which made the
French of the thirteenth century call Lincoln "Nicole," and their
descendants of the seventeenth call Kensington "Stintinton." Part is
mere stock or common-form Romance, as when Foulques goes to sea and has
adventures with the usual dragons and their usual captive princesses.
Part, though not quite dependent on the general stock, is indebted to
that of a particular kind, as in the repeated catching of the King by
the outlaws. But it is all more or less good reading; and there are two
episodes in the earlier part which (one of them especially) merit more
detailed account.

The first still has something of a general character about it. It is the
story of a certain Payn Peveril (for we meet many familiar names), who
seems to have been a real person though wrongly dated here, and has one
of those nocturnal combats with demon knights, the best known examples
of which are those recounted in _Marmion_ and its notes. Peveril's
antagonist, however--or rather the mask which the antagonist
takes,--connects with the oldest legendary history of the island, for he
reanimates the body of Gogmagog, the famous Cornish giant, whom Corineus
slew. The diabolic Gogmagog, however, seems neither to have stayed in
Cornwall nor gone to Cambridgeshire, though (oddly enough the French
editors do not seem to have noticed this) Payn Peveril actually held
fiefs in the neighbourhood of those exalted mountains called now by the
name of his foe. He had a hard fight; but luckily his arms were _or_
with a