Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 3.djvu/405

Rh France in 1161. Thierry has committed the same error in his history of the Norman Conquest.

From Becket we may pass, for the intervening chancellors are not worth a comment, to William Longchamp, bishop of Ely, the celebrated minister of Richard the First, and would add to the notice of him by Lord Campbell a fact which has hitherto been unpublished, viz. that it was about the times of Richard that "Chancery-lane" acquired its ominous name. There is extant a deed by which Longchamp demised certain messuages in the "Chancellor's-lane," heretofore the "New-street." Lord Campbell, it should be observed, has most successfully identified chancellor Longchamp with the minstrel Blondel, who is said to have serenaded Richard in his prison-house: according to his lordship the chancellor's song began, "O Richard, O mon Roy," &c. Unfortunately the authorities for this interesting discovery are omitted. It is difficult to imagine how the author fell into the singular error of dating the apocryphal letter of the Old Man of the Mountain at Messina, above all other places. Credulous as people undoubtedly were in those times, such a blunder could never have passed unnoticed. There is the less excuse for Lord Campbell, as the letter is printed in the Fœdera, and also translated by Thierry, to whom his lordship acknowledges many obligations.

We should by no means be disposed to attribute undue importance to these errata, but like inadvertencies mark almost every page of that division of this work to which our observations must be restricted, and necessarily impair the value of its authority. Even after Lord Campbell has arrived, in the course of his narrative, at that period of English history when a writer, not averse to the labour of research, might well abandon conjecture for certainty, we find him yielding to an imaginatory version of clearly-recorded facts, and ingeniously, though, as we believe, unintentionally, distorting those facts for the purpose of introducing the notice of an individual who has no more title to appear in this memorial of English chancellors and keepers of the Great Seal, than Friar Bacon has to be accounted the inventor of the steam-engine: we allude to Eleanor, consort of Henry the Third, whose life has been written by Lord Campbell, as a "Lady Keeper of the Great Seal." According to his lordship's account "she held the office nearly a whole year, performing all its duties, as well judicial as ministerial." We propose to shew that such was not the case, and that Lord Campbell wrote under a misapprehension of certain very simple facts. His lordship's first position is that Henry, "in the prospect of his going into Gascony in 1253," entrusted her with the custody of the great seal, "and the queen was left in the full exercise of her authority as lady keeper."

To this we reply that the credible testimony of a contemporary annalist entirely disproves the statement. The queen and Richard earl of Cornwall, were appointed "custodes" of the realm, and Matthew Paris informs us