England never saw Richard again; indeed, in the whole course of his ten years' reign, he only spent seven months on this side of the channel. His heart was always in France, where he had been bred up, and not in England, though he had been born in the palace of Beaumont, in Oxford, not fifty yards from the spot where these lines are written. The remaining six years of Richard's reign were entirely occupied in fruitless and weary border wars with the French king. It was a war of sieges and skirmishes, not of great battles. Richard held his own, in spite of the rebellions stirred up by Philip among his vassals in Aquitaine; but he did not succeed in crushing his adversary, as might have been expected from his superior military skill. In England the struggle was only felt through the heavy taxation which the king imposed on the land, to keep up his large mercenary army over-sea. Archbishop Hubert Walter ruled as Justiciar with considerable wisdom and success, and as long as Richard was sent the money that he craved, he left the realm to itself. Hubert's rule was not altogether a quiet one, but the very troubles that arose against him show the growing strength of national feeling and liberty in England. In 1198, the Great Council, headed by Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, refused the king's newest and most exorbitant schemes of taxation, and Hubert could not force them to pay. London in the same year was disturbed by a great democratic rising of the poorer citizens, headed by one William Fitz-Osbert, called Longbeard, who rose in riot to compel the aldermen to readjust the taxes of the city, and the Justiciar had to take arms to put it down. Fitz-Osbert fortified himself in Bow Church, but was wounded, taken, and hung. [Sidenote: =Death of Richard.=] An obscure and unworthy end was reserved for the restless and reckless son of the great Henry. He heard that Widomar, Viscount of Limoges, one of his vassals in Aquitaine, had found a great treasure-trove of gold, and bade him give it up. The viscount would not surrender all his find, so Richard laid siege to his castle of Chaluz. The place was taken, but while directing the attack the king received a wound from a crossbow bolt in his shoulder. His unskilful surgeons could not cure him, the wound gangrened, and Richard saw that his days were numbered. When the castle fell, Bertrand de Gourdon, the archer who had discharged the fatal bolt, was sought out and brought to his bedside. "What had I done that you should deal thus with me?" asked the king. "You slew my father and my two brothers with your own hands," replied the soldier, "and now I am ready to bear any torture since I know that you have to die." The fierce answer touched a chord to which Richard could respond. He bade his officers send the man away unharmed, but Mercadet, the chief among his mercenary captains, kept Gourdon in bonds till the king breathed his last, and then flayed him alive (April 6, 1199).