, and they ought to have lived together in peace
and harmony. And then, besides being related to each other through
their fathers, the two branches of the family intermarried together,
so as to make the relationships in the following generations so close
and so complicated that it was almost impossible to disentangle them.
In reading the history of those times, we find dukes or princes
fighting each other in the field, or laying plans to assassinate each
other, or striving to see which should make the other a captive, and
shut him up in a dungeon for the rest of his days; and yet these
enemies, so exasperated and implacable, are very near
relations--cousins, perhaps, if the relationship is reckoned in one
way, and uncle and nephew if it is reckoned in another. During the
period of this struggle, all the great personages of the court, and
all, or nearly all, the private families of the kingdom, and all the
towns and the villages, were divided and distracted by the dreadful
feud.

Richard's mother, whose name, before she was married, was Lady Cecily
Neville, was born into one side of this quarrel, and then afterward
married into the other side of it. This is a specimen of the way in
which the contest became complicated in multitudes of cases. Lady
Cecily was descended from the Duke of Lancaster, but she married the
Duke of York, in the third generation from the time when the quarrel
began.

Of course, upon her marriage, Lady Cecily Neville became the Duchess
of York. Her husband was a man of great political importance in his
day, and, like the other nobles of the land, was employed continually
in wars and in expeditions of various kinds, in the course of which he
was continually changing his residence from castle to castle all over
England, and sometimes making excursions into Ireland, Scotland, and
France. His wife accompanied him in many of these wanderings, and she
led, of course, so far as external circumstances were concerned, a
wild and adventurous life. She was, however, very quiet and domestic
in her tastes, though proud and ambitious in her aspirations, and she
occupied herself, wherever she was, in regulating her husband's
household, teaching and training her children, and in attending with
great regularity and faithfulness to her religious duty, as religious
duty was understood in those days.

The following is an account, copied from an ancient record, of the
manner in which she spent her days at one of the