sixty-seven years are only important by reason of the defects of our other sources.  No unity or colour can be expected in books handed from house to house and kept up to date by jottings by different hands.  The ascription of these Flores to a conjectural Matthew of Westminster by earlier editors is groundless.  Dr. C. Horstmann, Nova Legenda Anglie, i., pp. xlix. seq.(1901), maintains that John of Tynemouth’s Historia Aurea, still in manuscript, is the official St. Alban’s history from 1327 to 1377.

In the reign of Edward I. the credit of the school of St. Alban’s was revived to some extent by WILLIAM RISHANGER, who made his profession in 1271 and died early in the reign of Edward II.  To him is assigned a chronicle ranging from 1259 to 1306 published by H.T.  Riley in the volume Willelmi Rishanger et Anonymorum Chronica et Annales (Rolls Series).  Rishanger’s authorship of the portion 1259-1272 is more probable than that of the section 1272-1306, which, not compiled before 1327, is almost certainly by another hand, and the attribution of even the earlier section to Rishanger is doubted by so competent an authority as M. Bemont.  The compilation is frigid and unequal.  Of the miscellaneous contents of Mr. Riley’s volume, the short Gesta Edwardi I. (pp. 411-423), of no great value, is clearly Rishanger’s work.  We may also ascribe to Rishanger the Narratio de Bellis apud Lewes et Evesham (ed.  Halliwell, Camden Soc., 1840), which tells the story of the Barons’ Wars with vigour, detail, and insight.  Written by a true inheritor of the prejudices of Matthew Paris, this chronicle is a eulogy of Montfort.  It was put together not before 1312.

Another volume of Chroniclers of St. Alban’s was edited by Mr. Riley for the Rolls Series in 1860.  Three of its chronicles concern our period.  These are:  (1) Opus Chronicorum, 1259-1296, a source of “Rishanger’s” chronicle; (2) J. DE TROKELOWE’S Annales, 1307-1322; (3) H. DE BLANEFORDE’S Chronica (1323).  These last two are important for Edward II.’s reign.  After these works, historical writing further declined at St. Alban’s.  At the end of our period, however, another true disciple of Matthew Paris was found in the St. Alban’s monk who added to a jejune compilation for the years 1328 to 1370 a vivid and personal narrative of the years 1376-1388, our chief source for the history of the last year of Edward III.’s reign.  In his bitter prejudice against John of Gaunt and his clerical allies, such as Wychffe and the mendicants, the monk is so outspoken that his book was suppressed, and most manuscripts leave out the more offensive passages.  It has been edited by Sir E. Maunde Thompson as Chronicon Angliae, 1328-1388 (Rolls Series).  Before that its contents, like that of other St. Alban’s annals, were partially known through the fifteenth century compilation under the name of a St. Alban’s monk, THOMAS OF WALSINGHAM, whose Historia Anglicana (2 vols., Rolls Series, ed.  Riley) is not an authority for our period.