of you in meat or drink.”  Beneath the stern imperiousness of his outer bearing lay in fact a strange tenderness and sensitiveness to affection.  Every subject throughout his realm was drawn closer to the king who wept bitterly at the news of his father’s death though it gave him a crown, whose fiercest burst of vengeance was called out by an insult to his mother, whose crosses rose as memorials of his love and sorrow at every spot where his wife’s bier rested.  “I loved her tenderly in her lifetime,” wrote Edward to Eleanor’s friend, the Abbot of Cluny; “I do not cease to love her now she is dead.”  And as it was with mother and wife, so it was with his people at large.  All the self-concentrated isolation of the foreign kings disappeared in Edward.  He was the first English ruler since the Conquest who loved his people with a personal love and craved for their love back again.  To his trust in them we owe our Parliament, to his care for them the great statutes which stand in the forefront of our laws.  Even in his struggles with her England understood a temper which was so perfectly her own, and the quarrels between king and people during his reign are quarrels where, doggedly as they fought, neither disputant doubted for a moment the worth or affection of the other.  Few scenes in our history are more touching than a scene during the long contest over the Charter, when Edward stood face to face with his people in Westminster Hall, and with a sudden burst of tears owned himself frankly in the wrong.

[Sidenote:  Influence of Chivalry]

But it was just this sensitiveness, this openness to outer impressions and outer influences, that led to the strange contradictions which meet us in Edward’s career.  His reign was a time in which a foreign, influence told strongly on our manners, our literature, our national spirit, for the sudden rise of France into a compact and organized monarchy was now making its influence dominant in Western Europe.  The “chivalry” so familiar to us in the pages of Froissart, that picturesque mimicry of high sentiment, of heroism, love, and courtesy before which all depth and reality of nobleness disappeared to make room for the coarsest profligacy, the narrowest caste-spirit, and a brutal indifference to human suffering, was specially of French creation.  There was a nobleness in Edward’s nature from which the baser influences of this chivalry fell away.  His life was pure, his piety, save when it stooped to the superstition of the time, manly and sincere, while his high sense of duty saved him from the frivolous self-indulgence of his successors.  But he was far from being wholly free from the taint of his age.  His passionate desire was to be a model of the fashionable chivalry of his day.  His frame was that of a born soldier—­tall, deep-chested, long of limb, capable alike of endurance or action, and he shared to the full his people’s love of venture and hard fighting.  When he encountered Adam Gurdon after Evesham he forced him single-handed