His nephew, Thomas of Cantilupe, the baronial chancellor, fled to Paris, where he forsook politics for the study of theology.  The widowed Countess of Leicester was not saved by her near kindred to the king from lifelong banishment.  At last a general sentence of forfeiture was pronounced against all who had fought against Edward, either at Kenilworth or Evesham.  There was a greedy scramble for the spoils of victory.  The greatest of these, Montfort’s forfeited earldom of Leicester, went to Edmund, the king’s younger son.  Edward took back the earldom of Chester and all his old possessions.  Roger Mortimer was rewarded by grants of land and franchises which raised the house of Wigmore to a position only surpassed by that of the strongest of the earldoms.

At first the Montfort party showed an inclination to accept the defeat at Evesham as decisive.  Even young Simon of Montfort, who still held out at Kenilworth, considered it prudent to restore his prisoner, the King of the Romans, to liberty.  But the victors’ resolve to deprive all their beaten foes of their estates, drove the vanquished into fresh risings.  The first centre of the revolt of the disinherited was at Kenilworth, but before long the younger Simon abandoned the castle to join a numerous band which had found a more secure retreat in the isle of Axholme, amidst the marshes of the lower Trent.  There they held their own until the winter, when they were persuaded by Edward to accept terms.  A little later, Simon again revolted and joined the mariners of the Cinque Ports, whose towns still held out against the king, save Dover, which Edward had captured after a siege.  Under Simon’s leadership the Cinque Ports played the part of pirates on all merchants going to and from England.  At last in March, 1266, Edward forced Winchelsea to open its gates to him.  He next turned his arms against a valiant freebooter, Adam Gordon, who lurked with his band of outlaws in the dense beech woods of the Chilterns.  With the capture of Adam Gordon, after a hand-to-hand tussle with Edward in which the king’s son narrowly escaped with his life, the resistance in the south was at an end.

As one centre of rebellion was pacified other disturbances arose.  In the spring of 1266, Robert Ferrars, Earl of Derby, newly released from the prison into which Earl Simon had thrown him, raised a revolt in his own county.  On May 15, 1266, Derby was defeated by Henry of Almaine at Chesterfield.  His earldom was transferred to Edmund, the king’s son, already Montfort’s successor as Earl of Leicester, and in 1267 also Earl of Lancaster, a new earldom, deriving its name from the youngest of the shires.[1] Reduced to the Staffordshire estate of Chartley, the house of Ferrars fell back into the minor baronage.  Kenilworth was still unconquered.  Its walls were impregnable except to famine, and before his flight to Axholme young Simon had procured provisions adequate for a long resistance.  The garrison harried the