We must not, however, build up too large a superstructure of theory on this petty story of the police courts, plus a mild ecclesiastical scandal. Nor must we emphasize too much or generalise too largely from the signs of slackness and negligence shown in mediaeval trials. I become more and more averse to facile generalisation about the middle ages or mediaeval man. They may, moreover, be made in both directions. On the one side we have the doctrine of our greatest of recent scholars, bishop Stubbs, that the thirteenth century was the greatest century of the middle ages, the flowering type of mediaeval christianity and so on. But on the other hand there is the contradictory generalisation of students, like my friend Mr. Coulton, who surveys the time from St. Francis to Dante with the conviction that the so-called great days of faith were the days of unrestrained criminality and violence. Both these views can be argued; but neither are really convincing. They seem to me to be obtained by looking at one side of the question only. A more fruitful doctrine is surely the view that ordinary mediaeval men were not so very unlike ourselves, and that their virtues and vices were not those of saints or ruffians, but were not wholly out of relation to the ordinary humdrum virtues and vices that are found to-day. [1] A lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library on 20 January, 1915. NOTES. I. Note on Authorities. The accounts of the robbery of the king’s treasury in the Chronicles are vitiated by the obvious desire of the writers, who were mainly monks, to minimise the scandal to “religion” involved in the suspected complicity of the Westminster monks. This is seen even in the moderate account originating at St. Alban’s Abbey, and contained in William Rishanger’s _Chronicle_ (Rolls Series), pp. 222 and 225, and also in the other St. Alban’s version in _Gesta Edwardi Primi_, published in the same volume, pp. 420–1. The bias is naturally at its worst in the Westminster Abbey Chronicle, printed in _Flores Historiarum_, III. 115, 117, 121, and 131 (Rolls Series), which is more valuable perhaps as an index of Westminster opinion than as a dispassionate statement of the facts. The chief manuscript of this chronicle is preserved in the Chetham Library, Manchester [MS. Chetham No. 6712]. It was certainly written by a Westminster monk, and, perhaps after 1302, by Robert of Reading, who undoubtedly was the author of the account of the reign of Edward II. If Robert wrote the story of the robbery, it should be remembered that he was one of the forty-nine monks indicted and sent to the Tower on a charge of complicity in it. There are useful and more impartial notices in the non-monastic _Annales Londonienses_ in Stubbs’ _Chronicles of Edward I and Edward II_, I. 130, 131, 132, and 134 (Rolls Series). These date the robbery on 2 May.