was completed in twenty-three years.

BOHUN, the name of a family which plays an important part in English
history during the 13th and 14th centuries; it was taken from a village
situated in the Cotentin between Coutances and the estuary of the Vire.
The Bohuns came into England at, or shortly after, the Norman Conquest;
but their early history there is obscure. The founder of their greatness
was Humphrey III., who in the latter years of Henry I., makes his
appearance as a _dapifer_, or steward, in the royal household. He
married the daughter of Milo of Gloucester, and played an ambiguous part
in Stephen's reign, siding at first with the king and afterwards with
the empress. Humphrey III. lived until 1187, but his history is
uneventful. He remained loyal to Henry II. through all changes, and
fought in 1173 at Farnham against the rebels of East Anglia. Outliving
his eldest son, Humphrey IV., he was succeeded in the family estates by
his grandson Henry. Henry was connected with the royal house of Scotland
through his mother Margaret, a sister of William the Lion; an alliance
which no doubt assisted him to obtain the earldom of Hereford from John
(1199). The lands of the family lay chiefly on the Welsh Marches, and
from this date the Bohuns take a foremost place among the Marcher
barons. Henry de Bohun figures with the earls of Clare and Gloucester
among the twenty-five barons who were elected by their fellows to
enforce the terms of the Great Charter. In the subsequent civil war he
fought on the side of Louis, and was captured at the battle of Lincoln
(1217). He took the cross in the same year and died on his pilgrimage
(June 1, 1220). Humphrey V., his son and heir, returned to the path of
loyalty, and was permitted, some time before 1239, to inherit the
earldom of Essex from his maternal uncle, William de Mandeville. But in
1258 this Humphrey fell away, like his father, from the royal to the
baronial cause. He served as a nominee of the opposition on the
committee of twenty-four which was appointed, in the Oxford parliament
of that year, to reform the administration. It was only the alliance of
Montfort with Llewelyn of North Wales that brought the earl of Hereford
back to his allegiance. Humphrey V. headed the first secession of the
Welsh Marchers from the party of the opposition (1263), and was amongst
the captives whom the Montfortians took at Lewes. The earl's son and
namesake was on the victorious side, and sh