three thousand men, women, and children were slain and beheaded that day. God have mercy on their souls! for I trow they were martyrs." Disease by this time seems to have debilitated and perverted the very moral nature of the prince. He was soon after obliged to sheathe his sword, and come home to England, where he lingered, in such debility and suffering as allowed him to take very little actual share in public affairs, although his name remained influential, till his death on the 8th of June, 1376. The war in France, meanwhile, had prospered so ill, that by the year 1374 Edward, who had retained and still used the title of king of that country, had lost all the territory he had ever possessed there, with the exception only of Calais, Bordeaux, and Bayonne, and a few detached localities between those two last-named towns. No peace, however, was ever made while Edward lived. After the death of the Black Prince the chief ascendancy in the government was acquired by his younger brother John of Gaunt (that is, Ghent, the place of his birth), Duke of Lancaster. The king himself, who had lost Queen Philippa in 1369, had, in the weakness of old age, sunk under the dominion of a female favourite, Alice Perrers or Piers. She was a married woman, and had been lady of the bedchamber to Queen Philippa; and she is said to have been eminently distinguished by her wit and talent, as well as by her beauty, an influence to which Edward had all his life been extremely sensible, although in his better days he had at least never allowed it to master the soldier or the king. This artful woman, however, soon acquired so much power over him, and abused it with so much insolence, that shortly before the death of the Black Prince the parliament had passed an ordinance declaring that, whereas complaint had been made before the king that some women had pursued causes and actions in the king's courts by way of maintainance, and for hire and reward, which thing displeased the king, the king forbade that any woman should do it hereafter, "and in particular Alice Perrers, under the penalty of forfeiting all that the said Alice can forfeit, and of being banished out of the realm." Alice, notwithstanding, still remained about the king's person; while Edward, wasting with disease, lay, to quote the words of Stow, "neglecting the benefit of time that God had given him, like as he should never have died; trusting the fond fables of the oft-named Alice when she affirmed he should recover his health, so that at that time he talked rather of hawking and hunting than of any thing that pertained to the saving of his soul; only he granted pardon of death for offences throughout his kingdom to the inhabitants." "Being now," continues this old chronicler, "suddenly taken with the day of his death, he began to have manifest signs thereof; what Alice Piers then did any man may judge, although we set them not down in writing; for, as