in point of chronological order, than that the contracting parties should have postponed their contemplated arrangement to a period when success must have appeared almost beyond hope. Independently, however, of the suspicion cast on the document by the date assigned to it in the manuscript, it seems to carry with it internal evidence against itself. The contract was made by Edmund Mortimer, the Earl of Northumberland, and Owyn, and among them the land was to be divided; but, so far from the report of such an intended distribution being corroborated by any other authority, there is much evidence to render it incredible. Edmund Mortimer's own genuine letter, for example, announcing his adhesion to Owyn, which preceded this agreement, makes no allusion to the Percies, or even to himself, as portionists. "The cause," he says, "which he espoused would guarantee to Owyn his rights in Wales, and, in case Richard were dead, would place the Earl of March on the throne." It is, indeed, scarcely conceivable that the nobles, the gentry, and the people at large would have suffered their land to be cut up into portions, destroying the integrity of the kingdom, and exposing it with increased facilities to foreign (p. 157) invasion, and interminable intestine warfare; whilst neither of the three who were to share the spoil had any pretensions of title to the crown. It is scarcely less inconceivable that three men, such as Mortimer, Glyndowr, and Northumberland, could have seriously devised so desperate a scheme. [Footnote 152: Nevertheless, it should be remembered that many ancient accounts mention the Earl of Northumberland's visit to Glyndowr subsequently to his return from the flight into Scotland, and that the French auxiliaries invaded England under Glyndowr's standard long after the battle of Shrewsbury. It was on the last day of February 1408, that Rokeby, Sheriff of Yorkshire, compelled Northumberland and Lord Bardolf to engage with him in the field of Bramham Moor, when the Earl fell in battle, and Lord Bardolf died of his wounds. The Earl's head, covered with the snows of age, was exposed on London Bridge. The people lamented his fate when they recalled to mind his former magnificence and glory. Many (says Walsingham) applied to him the lines of Lucan: Sed nos nec sanguis, nec tantum vulnera nostri Afficere senis, quantum gestata per urbem Ora ducis, quae transfixo deformia pilo Vidimus.]