Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/36

28 that Edward sent him as his envoy to William, there is no corroboration at all.

Long although this paper is, and grievous as is the waste of time, which might be better employed, in rebutting his arguments one by one, and showing 'how unfair and unreliable'—to quote Mr. Rye's own phrase —are the statements in his 'vindication' of the 'Chronicle', it must be remembered that, were he right in asserting its story to be true, we should have to accept its evidence as a contribution of importance to the English history of the time. As Mr. Waters pointed out (in 1885), it 'is quoted with confidence by Palgrave, and every other historian of the period except Freeman'. This, no doubt, explains the wrath of Mr. Walter Rye and his attempt to show, now that 'Freeman is dead', that he 'practically withdrew his case against the Chronicle'. I agree entirely with Freeman's conclusion, in his William Rufus, that 'the share taken by Eudo in the accession of William seems to be pure fiction … to be wholly mythical'.

"It is in short a family legend devised in honour of the house of Rye. The same part is played in two successive generations; the father secures the crown for the elder William, the son for the younger."

The exaltation, in these monastic stories, of the pious founder and his relatives is no uncommon feature; in the Colchester case it may have had some special object. It was possibly intended to explain the favour alleged to be shown to Eudo and his abbey by the Crown in its charters, where they were spurious. Those who can speak with authority on the language of the time could tell us whether such a phrase as that Eudo received his stewardship 'pro sui patris suaeque in regalem familiam devotione'—which Mr. Rye renders as 'for the devotion of his father and himself to the royal family ' —was even possible at the time.

In all my own experience I remember no such instance of absolutely reckless inaccuracy as that of which, in this paper, I have given conclusive proof. One can only assume that Mr. Walter Rye, when he thus set himself to expose what he terms 'Freeman's inaccuracies' [sic] and his 'glaring errors', cannot possibly have foreseen that the result of this inquiry—