aristocracy against Hubert.  The contest between them had been fought with such chivalry that the last public act of the old earl was to protect the fallen justiciar from the violence of his foes.  For more than fifty years Randolph had ruled like a king over his palatine earldom; had, like his master, his struggles with his own vassals, and had perforce to grant to his own barons and boroughs liberties which he strove to wrest from his overlord for himself and his fellow nobles.  He was not a great statesman, and hardly even a successful warrior.  Yet his popular personal qualities, his energy, his long duration of power, and his enormous possessions, give him a place in history.  His memory, living on long in the minds of the people, inspired a series of ballads which vied in popularity with the cycle of Robin Hood,[1] though, unfortunately, they have not come down to us.  His estates were divided among his four sisters.  His nephew, John the Scot, Earl of Huntingdon, received a re-grant of the Chester earldom; his Lancashire lands had already gone to his brother-in-law, William of Ferrars, Earl of Derby; other portions of his territories went to his sister, the Countess of Arundel, and the Lincoln earldom, passing through another sister, Hawise of Quincy, to her son-in-law, John of Lacy, constable of Chester, raised the chief vassal of the palatinate to comital rank.  None of these heirs of a divided inheritance were true successors to Randolph.  With him died the last of the great Norman houses, tenacious beyond its fellows, and surpassing in its two centuries of unbroken male descent the usual duration of the medieval baronial family.  Its collapse made easier the alien invasion which threatened to undo Hubert’s work.

    [1] “Ich can rymes of Robyn Hode, and of Randolf erl of
    Chestre,” Vision of Piers Plowman, i., 167; ii., 94.

CHAPTER III.

THE ALIEN INVASION.

With the dismissal of Hubert on July 29, 1232, Peter des Roches resumed his authority over Henry III.  Mindful of past failures, the bishop’s aim was to rule through dependants, so that he could pull the wires without making himself too prominent.  His chief agents in pursuing this policy were Peter of Rivaux, Stephen Segrave, and Robert Passelewe.  Of these, Peter of Rivaux was a Poitevin clerk, officially described as the bishop’s nephew, but generally supposed to have been his son.  Stephen Segrave, the son of a small Leicestershire landholder, was a lawyer who had held many judicial and administrative posts, including the regency during the king’s absence abroad in 1230.  He abandoned his original clerical profession, received knighthood, married nobly, and was the founder of a baronial house in the midlands.  His only political principle was obedience to the powers that were in the ascendant.  Passelewe, a clerk who had acted as the agent of Randolph of Chester and Falkes of Breaute at the Roman court, was, like Segrave, a mere tool.