ceased to be actively loyal, and in 1315 he complied with the royal summons to bear arms against the Flemings. He was at Joinville again in 1317, and on the 11th of July 1319 he died at the age of ninety-five, leaving his possessions and his position as seneschal of Champagne to his second son Anselm. He was buried in the neighbouring church of St Laurent, where during the Revolution his bones underwent profanation. Besides his _Histoire de Saint Louis_ and his _Credo_ or "Confession of Faith" written much earlier, a considerable number, relatively speaking, of letters and business documents concerning the fief of Joinville and so forth are extant. These have an importance which we shall consider further on; but Joinville owes his place in general estimation only to his history of his crusading experiences and of the subsequent fate of St Louis. Of the famous French history books of the middle ages Joinville's bears the most vivid impress of the personal characteristics of its composer. It does not, like Villehardouin, give us a picture of the temper and habits of a whole order or cast of men during a heroic period of human history; it falls far short of Froissart in vivid portraying of the picturesque and external aspects of social life; but it is a more personal book than either. The age and circumstances of the writer must not be forgotten in reading it. He is a very old man telling of circumstances which occurred in his youth. He evidently thinks that the times have not changed for the better--what with the frequency with which the devil is invoked in modern France, and the sinful expenditure common in the matter of embroidered silk coats. But this laudation of times past concentrates itself almost wholly on the person of the sainted king whom, while with feudal independence he had declined to swear fealty to him, "because I was not his man," he evidently regarded with an unlimited reverence. His age, too, while garrulous to a degree, seems to have been free from the slightest taint of boasting. No one perhaps ever took less trouble to make himself out a hero than Joinville. He is constantly admitting that on such and such an occasion he was terribly afraid; he confesses without the least shame that, when one of his followers suggested defiance of the Saracens and voluntary death, he (Joinville) paid not the least attention to him; nor does he attempt to gloss in any way his refusal to accompany St Louis on his unlucky second crusade, or his invincible conviction that it was better to be in mortal sin than to have the leprosy, or his decided preference for wine as little watered as might be, or any other weakness. Yet he was a sincerely religious man, as the curious _Credo_, written at Acre and forming a kind of anticipatory appendix to the history, sufficiently shows. He presents himself as an altogether human person, brave enough in the field, and, at least when young, capable of extravagant devotion