mischief, and being young men and active, went willingly enough; but it was otherwise with the uncle, who was now a very old man. Bishop Roger had lost his relish for courts, and seemingly had some presentiment; for, as he started on his journey, he was heard to say, "By my Ladie St. Mary, I know not wherefore, but my heart is heavy; but this I do know for a surety, that I shall be of much the same service at court as a fool in battle." At Oxenford the three bishops were received with a great show of courtesy, as men who had done notable service to the king, and as men whom the king delighted to honour; but they had not been long in the town when a fierce quarrel arose about quarters and purveyance between the retainers of Bishop Roger and the followers of that outlandish man the Earl of Brittany. The aged prelate would have stilled this tumult, but the Bretons, who had been purposely set on by those about the king, would not desist, and swords being drawn on both sides, the affray did not end until many men of the commoner sort were wounded, and one knight was slain. And hereupon it was wickedly given out that the bishops' people had begun the affray, and that the three bishops had set them on to break the king's peace, and murther his guests within the precincts of his royal court. Bishop Roger, the uncle, was seized in the king's own hall, and Alexander, the bishop of Lincoln, at his lodgings in the town; but Bishop Nigel, who had taken up his quarters in a house outside the town, getting to horse, galloped across the country, and threw himself into the castle of Devizes, the strongest of all his uncle's strongholds. And it was thought that the Bishop of Ely would not have been able to do this, and to distance his pursuers by leaping hedge and ditch, if he had not providentially practised hunting and hawking in his easy days. Bishop Roger, and his less fortunate nephew Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, were confined in separate dungeons at Oxenford. They were severally told that the king held them as traitors, and that the price of their liberation would be surrender unto Stephen of all their castles and manors, with whatsoever treasure they contained; and those who delivered the message chuckled at it, seeing that they hoped to have a share in the great spoil. At first Bishop Roger and Bishop Alexander did manfully refuse to give up anything, but bishops in dungeons and in chains are weak, and kings be sometimes very strong; and after they had been menaced with torture and death, the two prelates put their names and seals to an act of surrender and renunciation, and the castles which Roger had built at Malmsbury and Sherborne, and that which he had enlarged and strengthened at Sarum, and the magnificent castle which Bishop Alexander had built at Newark, together with other places of strength, were taken possession of by the king's people, in virtue of the orders of the two bishops to their own people. But the alert,