[Sidenote:  Matthew Paris]

While Simon had been warring with Gascon rebels affairs in England had been going from bad to worse.  The scourge of Papal taxation fell heavier on the clergy.  After vain appeals to Rome and to the king, Archbishop Edmund retired to an exile of despair at Pontigny, and tax-gatherer after tax-gatherer with powers of excommunication, suspension from orders, and presentation to benefices, descended on the unhappy priesthood.  The wholesale pillage kindled a wide spirit of resistance.  Oxford gave the signal by hunting a Papal legate out of the city amid cries of “usurer” and “simoniac” from the mob of students.  Fulk Fitz-Warenne in the name of the barons bade a Papal collector begone out of England.  “If you tarry here three days longer,” he added, “you and your company shall be cut to pieces.”  For a time Henry himself was swept away by the tide of national indignation.  Letters from the king, the nobles, and the prelates, protested against the Papal exactions, and orders were given that no money should be exported from the realm.  But the threat of interdict soon drove Henry back on a policy of spoliation in which he went hand in hand with Rome.  The temper which this oppression begot among even the most sober churchmen has been preserved for us by an annalist whose pages glow with the new outburst of patriotic feeling.  Matthew Paris is the greatest, as he in reality is the last, of our monastic historians.  The school of St. Alban’s survived indeed till a far later time, but its writers dwindle into mere annalists whose view is bounded by the abbey precincts and whose work is as colourless as it is jejune.  In Matthew the breadth and precision of the narrative, the copiousness of his information on topics whether national or European, the general fairness and justice of his comments, are only surpassed by the patriotic fire and enthusiasm of the whole.  He had succeeded Roger of Wendover as chronicler at St. Alban’s; and the Greater Chronicle with an abridgement of it which long passed under the name of Matthew of Westminster, a “History of the English,” and the “Lives of the Earlier Abbots,” are only a few among the voluminous works which attest his prodigious industry.  He was an artist as well as an historian, and many of the manuscripts which are preserved are illustrated by his own hand.  A large circle of correspondents—­bishops like Grosseteste, ministers like Hubert de Burgh, officials like Alexander de Swereford—­furnished him with minute accounts of political and ecclesiastical proceedings.  Pilgrims from the East and Papal agents brought news of foreign events to his scriptorium at St. Alban’s.  He had access to and quotes largely from state documents, charters, and exchequer rolls.  The frequency of royal visits to the abbey brought him a store of political intelligence, and Henry himself contributed to the great chronicle which has preserved with so terrible a faithfulness the memory of his weakness and misgovernment.  On one