A truce, as usual, at the end of the year, again suspended hostilities for a space. The war was renewed on its termination, and in this campaign (of the year 1198) Richard gained one of his greatest victories near Gisors, when Philip in his flight fell into the river Epte, and was nearly drowned. After this, by the intercession of the Pope's legate, a truce was concluded between the two kings for five years, and they never met again in fight; although they probably would, notwithstanding the truce, if both had lived. But on March 26th in the following year, 1199, as Richard was engaged in reducing the castle of Chaluz, the stronghold of one of his Aquitanian vassals, Vidomar, Viscount of Limoges, who it seems had refused to surrender a treasure found on his estate, to which the king laid claim in right of his feudal superiority, Coeur de Lion was struck in the left shoulder by an arrow, aimed from the rampart of the castle by a youth named Bertrand de Gurdun. The wound would not have been dangerous but for the mismanagement of the surgeon in his attempts to extract the arrow-head, which had broken off in the flesh. As it was, Richard lived only till Tuesday, April 16th. The shot was a fatal one in every way; in the fury into which the wound of the king threw the besieging army the castle was taken by storm, and all the persons found in it were immediately hanged, as some authorities say, by the king's orders, with the exception only of Gurdun. He was brought into the presence of his dying victim, when Richard, under the impulse of generosity or compunction, gave him his liberty, with a hundred shillings to take him home; but after the king's death he was flayed alive, and then hanged, by order of Marchadee, the leader of the Brabantine mercenaries serving in Richard's army. The character of Richard is, of course, not to be judged without reference to the general manners of the age in which he lived. It is probable enough that there was hardly an excess, either of violence or licentiousness, into which his impetuous temperament did not occasionally precipitate him; but he seems to have had nothing base or malignant in his composition; and that he was as capable of acts of extraordinary generosity and disinterestedness as of excesses of brutal fury or profligacy. Of the courage and strength of will proper to his race, he had his full share, with more than his share of their strength of thew and sinew; and his intellectual powers, both natural and acquired, were also of a high order. He was renowned in his own day not only as beyond all dispute the stoutest and most gallant of living heroes, but as likewise occupying a place in the foremost rank of those who excelled in wit, in eloquence, and in song. ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI[6] [Footnote 6: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.] By GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP, LL.D. (1182-1226) [Illustration: St. Francis of Assisi.]