Page:William of Malmesbury's Chronicle.djvu/507

 and, at Rouen, condescended to honour him, not only with presents from himself, but also from the nobility, and even the Jews. Yet Innocent, though greatly assisted by the kings of England and France, and the emperor of Germany, could never enjoy peace so long as Anaclet occupied the see of Rome. However, Anaclet himself dying in the eighth year of his usurped papacy, as it was called. Innocent enjoys the papal dignity unmolested to the present time.

In the thirty-first year of his reign, king Henry returned to England. The empress, too, in the same year, arrived on her native soil, and a full meeting of the nobility being held at Northampton, the oath of fidelity to her was renewed by such as had already sworn, and also taken by such as hitherto had not. In the same year Lewis, king of France, growing aged and unwieldy through extreme corpulency, commanded his son to be crowned as successor to the kingdom; who dying soon after by the fall of his horse, he caused another of his sons to be consecrated king, by the hands of the Roman pontiff. He, as they relate, not degenerating from the ancient valour of the French, hath also acquired Aquitain, as the marriage portion of his wife, which, it is well known, the kings of France have never held in their own right since Lewis, son of Charles the Great.

In the thirty-first [second] year of king Henry, a dreadful murrain among domestic animals extended over the whole of England. Entire herds of swine suddenly perished; whole stalls of oxen were swept off in a moment: the same contagion continued in the following years, so that no village throughout the kingdom was free from this calamity, or able to exult at the losses of its neighbours. At this time, too, the contention between Bernard, bishop of St. David's, and Urban, of Landaff, on the rights of their dioceses, which Urban had illegally usurped, was finally put to