"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.