of history.  His campaigns were ill-planned; and he lacked the self-restraint and sense of proportion which would have prevented him from aiming at objects beyond his reach.  The same want of relation between ends and means, the same want of definite policy and clear ideals, marred his statecraft.  Yet contemporaries, conscious of his faults, magnified Edward as the brilliant and successful king who had won for himself an assured place among the greatest monarchs of history, “Never,” says Froissart, “had there been such a king since the days of Arthur King of Great Britain."[1] Even to his own age his senile degradation pointed the moral of the triumphs of his manhood.  The modern historian, who sees, beneath the superficial splendour of the days of Edward III., the misery and degradation that underlay the wreck of the dying Middle Ages, is in no danger of appraising too highly the merits of this showy and ambitious monarch.  Perhaps in our own days the reaction has gone too far, and we have been taught to undervalue the splendid energy and robustness of temperament which commanded the admiration of all Europe, and personified the strenuous ideals of the young English nation.

    [1] Froissart (ed.  Luce), viii., 231; cf.  Canon of
    Bridlington, p. 95.

The internal history of the first few years of Edward’s reign was uneventful.  John Stratford became chancellor after Mortimer’s fall, and remained for ten years the guiding spirit of the administration.  Translated on Meopham’s death in 1333 to Canterbury, he continued, as primate, to take a leading part in politics.  His chief helper was his brother Robert, rewarded in 1337 by the see of Chichester.  The brothers were capable but not brilliant politicians.  The worst disorders of the times of anarchy were put down, and parliaments readily granted sufficient money to meet the king’s necessities.  After a few years, the strife of parties was so far hushed that Burghersh was suffered to return to office, and it looks as if the balance between the Lancastrian party, upheld by the Stratfords, and the old middle party of Pembroke and Badlesmere, with which Burghersh had hereditary connexions, was maintained, as it had been during the least unhappy period of the preceding reign.  The country was growing rich and prosperous.  The annalists tell us of little save tournaments and mummings, and the setting up of seven new earldoms to remedy the gaps which death and forfeiture had made in the higher circle of the baronage.  The earldom of Devon was revived for the house of Courtenay; that of Salisbury in favour of the trusty William Montague, and an Audley, son of Despenser’s rival, was raised to the earldom of Gloucester.  William Bohun, a younger son of the Humphrey slain at Boroughbridge, became Earl of Northampton, an Ufford, Earl of Suffolk, a Clinton Earl of Huntingdon, a Hastings Earl of Pembroke, and Henry of Grosmont, the Earl of Lancaster’s first born, Earl of Derby.  A new rank was added