In June Edward lay on his deathbed at Sheen.  To the last his talk was all of hawking and hunting, and his mistress carefully kept from him all knowledge of his desperate condition.  When he sank into his last lethargy, his courtiers deserted him, and Alice Perrers took to flight after robbing him of the very rings on his fingers.  A simple priest, brought to the bedside by pity, performed for the half-conscious king the last offices of religion.  Edward was just able to kiss the cross and murmur “Jesus have mercy”.  On June 21, 1377, he breathed his last.

With Edward’s death we break off a narrative whose course is but half run.  John of Gaunt’s rule was not over; Wycliffe was advancing from discontent to revolt; Chaucer was yet to rise for a higher flight; Langland had not yet put his complaint into its permanent form; the French war was renewed almost on the day of Edward’s death; popular irritation against bad government, and social and economic repression were still preparing for the revolt of 1381.  With all its defects the age of Edward is preeminently a strong age.  Greedy, self-seeking, rough, and violent it may be; its passions and rivalries combined to make futile the exercise of its strength; it sounded the revolutionary note of all abrupt ages of transition, and it ends in disaster and demoralisation at home and abroad.  But government is not everything, and least of all in the Middle Ages when what was then thought vigorous government appears miserably weak to modern notions.  The strong rule decayed with the failure of the king’s personal vigour.  The ministers of Edward’s dotage could not hold France nor even keep England quiet.  England had grown impatient of the rule of a despot, though she was not yet able to govern herself after a constitutional fashion.  It is in the incompatibility of the political ideals of royal authority and constitutional control, not less than in the want of purpose of her ruler and in the factions of her nobles that the explanation of the period must be sought.  The age of Edward III. has been alternatively decried and exalted.  Both verdicts are true, but neither contains the whole truth.  The explanation of both is to be found in the annals of a later age.

APPENDIX.

ON AUTHORITIES.

(1216-1377.)

Our two main sources of knowledge for medieval history are records and chronicles.  Chronicles are more accessible, easier to study, more continuous, readable, and coloured than records can generally be.  Yet the record far excels the chronicle in scope, authority, and objectivity, and a prime characteristic of modern research is the increasing reliance on the record rather than the chronicle as the sounder basis of historical investigation.  The medieval archives of England, now mainly collected in the Public Record Office, are unrivalled by those of any other country.  From the accession of Henry III. several of the more important classes of records have become copious and continuous, while in the course of the reign nearly all the chief groups of documents have made a beginning.  The whole of the period 1216 to 1377 can therefore be well studied in them.