This bishop was Peter de Aigueblanche, one of the foreign favourites, who had been intruded into the see of Hereford, to the exclusion of a better man, and had been an oppressor of those who were under his rule. The barons seized him, threw him into prison, and plundered his possessions, and at the time this song was written, he was suffering under the imprisonment which appears to have shortened his life. [62] I have published from the original manuscripts the mass of the political poetry composed in England during the middle ages in my three volumes--"The Political Songs of England, from the Reign of John to that of Edward II." 4to., London, 1839 (issued by the Camden Society); and "Political Poems and Songs relating to English History, composed during the Period from the Accession of Edward III. to that of Richard III." 8vo., vol i., London, 1859; vol. ii., 1861 (published by the Treasury, under the direction of the Master of the Rolls.) [63] "Receuil de Chants Historiques Français depuis le xii^e. jusqu'au xviii^e. Siècle, par Leroux de Lincy.... Première Série, xii^e., xiii^e., xiv^e, et xv^e., Siècles." 8vo., Paris, 1841. The universities and the clerical body in general were deeply involved in these political movements of the thirteenth century; and our earliest political songs now known are composed in Latin, and in that form and style of verse which seems to have been peculiar to the goliards, and which I venture to call goliardic. Such is a song against the three bishops who supported king John in his quarrel with the pope about the presentation to the see of Canterbury, printed in my Political Songs. Such, too, is the song of the Welsh, and one or two others, in the same volume. And such, above all, is that remarkable Latin poem in which a partisan of the barons, immediately after the victory at Lewes, set forth the political tenets of his party, and gave the principles of English liberty nearly the same broad basis on which they stand at the present. It is an evidence of the extent to which these principles were now acknowledged, that in this great baronial struggle our political songs began to be written in the English language, an acknowledgment that they concerned the whole English public.