The chronicle of the reigns of Henry II and Richard I, A.D. 1169-1192: known commonly under the name of Benedict of Peterborough, Issue 49, Volume 2

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William Stubbs
Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867 - Great Britain
 

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Page x - ... not to the success of his personal ambition, but to the brilliant qualities brought out by the exigencies of his affairs ; whilst on the latter, both as a man and as a king, fell the heaviest crash of accumulated misery. None of the others seem to have had a wish to carry out the true grand conception of kingship. And thus it is with the extinction of the male line of Plantagenet that the social happiness of the English people begins.
Page xxx - He had a wonderful memory, well stored with the lessons of past times, and with the experiences of constant journeys, on which he was careful to see everything that was to be seen. He had little regard for more than the merest forms of religion ; like Napoleon Bonaparte, he heard mass daily, but without paying decent attention to the ceremony.
Page xcv - Of (1161), probably for payment of debts incurred for the same war, the assessment being, in this as in the former case, two marks to the knight's fee. It is possibly to the joint sum of these two scutages that the words of Gervase are to be applied when he states that the whole scutage for the war of Toulouse raised in England was 180,000?.
Page cxxiv - He was faithful to the letter of his engagements. He recovered the demesne rights of the crown, so that his royal dignity did not depend for maintenance on constant taxation. He restored the usurped estates ; he destroyed the illegal castles, and the system which they typified ; he maintained the royal hold on the lawful ones, and the equality and uniformity of justice, which their usurpers had subverted : he restored internal peace, and with it plenty, as the riches of England in the following reign...
Page xi - ... less disastrous to their subjects than before, and the prosperity of the state has increased in no proportion to the ability of the kings. And yet no two of these princes were alike in the constituent proportions of their temperament. The leading feature of one was falsehood, of another cruelty, of another licentiousness, of another unscrupulous ambition : one was the slave of women, another of unworthy favourites ; one a raiser of taxes, another a shedder of the blood of his people. Yet there...

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