Page:William of Malmesbury's Chronicle.djvu/523

 places and very lately at Oxford, attacked the attendants, and even the very nephew of earl Alan, as well as the servants of Hervey de Lyons, a man of such high nobility, and so extremely haughty, that he had never deigned to visit England though king Henry had invited him; that the injury, therefore, of such violence having been offered him, doubly recoiled on king Stephen, through respect to whom he had come hither; that the bishop of Lincoln had been the author of the tumult excited by his followers from ancient enmity to Alan; that the bishop of Salisbury secretly favoured the king's enemies, though he disguised his subtlety for the moment; that the king had discovered this beyond all doubt, from many circumstances, more especially, however, from the said bishop's having refused permission to Roger de Mortimer with the king's soldiers whom he was conducting, when under the greatest apprehensions from the garrison of Bristol, to continue even a single night at Malmesbury; that it was in every person's mouth, that, as soon as the empress should arrive, he would join her party, with his nephews and their castles; that Roger, in consequence, was made captive, not as a bishop but as the king's servant who had administered his affairs and received his wages; that the king had not taken their castles by violence, but that both bishops had surrendered them voluntarily to escape the punishment due to the disturbance they had excited in the court; that the king had found some trifling sums of money in the castles which must lawfully belong to himself, as bishop Roger had collected it from the revenues of the exchequer in the times of his uncle and predecessor king Henry; that the bishop had readily relinquished this money as well as the castles through consciousness of his offences, of which the king did not want for witnesses; that, therefore, he was willing that the conditions entered into by himself and the bishops should remain in force."

It was rejoined by bishop Roger, in opposition to the speech of Alberic, that he had never been the minister of king Stephen; nor had he received his wages. This spirited man, too, who blushed at being cast down by adversity, threatened, that if he could not have justice for the property which had been wrested from him, in that council, he would seek it in the audience of a higher court. The legate