RICHARD CCEUR DE LION 71 ben, styled Longbeard, a citizen of London, who is admitted to have possessed both eloquence and learning, and whose whole character and proceedings might not improbably, if he had had his own historian, have assumed a very different complexion from what has been given to him. Longbeard, who acquired the names of the Advocate and King of the Poor, is affirmed to have had above fifty thousand of the lower orders associated with him by oaths which bound them to follow whithersoever he led. When an attempt was made to apprehend him by two of thfe wealthier citizens, he drew his knife and stabbed one of them, named Geoffrey, to the heart, and then took refuge in the church of St Mary-le- Bow in Cheapside, the tower of which he and his followers fortified, and held for three days, when they were at last (April 7, 1196), dislodged by fire being set to the building. Fitz-Osbert was first dragged at a horse's tail to the Tower, and then to the Elms in West Smithfield, where he was hanged, with nine of his fol- lowers. The people, however, long continued to regard him as a martyr. The war between Richard and Philip broke out again in 1197, and in the course of this campaign Richard had the gratification of capturing the Bishop oi Beauvais, a personage whom he had reason to regard as a main instigator of the severities and indignities which he had sustained at the hands of the emperor. The bishop was taken armed cap-a-pie and fighting, and when Pope Celestine recommended him to the clemency of Richard as his son, the English king sent his holiness the bishop's coat of mail, with the following verse of Scripture at- tached to it : " This have we found ; know now whether it be thy son's coat, or no." This same year, too, finished the career of the Emperor Henry, who, in his last moments, is said to have expressed the extremest remorse for the manner in which he had treated the great champion of the Cross. Richard's other en emy, Leopold, Duke of Austria, had been killed by a fall from his horse two years before. A truce, as usual, at the end of the year, again suspended hostilities for a space. The war was renewed on its termination, and in this campaign (of the year 1198) Richard gained one of his greatest victories near Gisors, when Philip in his flight fell into the river Epte, and was nearly drowned. After this, by the intercession of the Pope's legate, a truce was concluded between the two kings for five years, and they never met again in fight ; although they probably would, notwithstanding the truce, if both had lived. But on March 26th in the follow- ing year, 1199, as Richard was engaged in reducing the castle of Chaluz, the stronghold of one of his Aquitanian vassals, Vidomar, Viscount of Limoges, who it seems had refused to surrender a treasure found on his estate, to which the king laid claim in right of his feudal superiority, Coeur de Lion was struck in the left shoulder by an arrow, aimed from the rampart of the castle by a youth named Bertrand de Gurdun. The wound would not have been dangerous but for the mismanagement of the surgeon in his attempts to extract the arrow-head, which had broken off in the flesh. As it was, Richard lived only till Tuesday, April 1 6th. The shot was a fatal one in every way ; in the fury into which the wound of the king threw the besieging army the castle was taken by storm, and all the
