"Behold, therefore, this England of the year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer's Fœdera, and Doctrines of the Constitution; but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The sun shone on it; the vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrow-fields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary, to their several lairs.... The _Dominus Rex_, at departing, gave us 'thirteen _sterlingii_,' one shilling and one penny, to say a mass for him.... For king Lackland _was_ there, verily he.... There, we say, is the grand peculiarity; the immeasurable one; distinguishing to a really infinite degree, the poorest historical Fact from all Fiction whatsoever. 'Fiction,' 'Imagination, Imaginative poetry,' etc., etc., except as the vehicle for truth, or is fact of some sort... what is it?[344]... And yet these grim old walls are not a dilettantism and dubiety; they are an earnest fact. It was a most real and serious purpose they were built for! Yes, another world it was, when these black ruins, white in their new mortar and fresh chiselling, first saw the sun as walls, long ago.... Their architecture, belfries, land-carucates? Yes--and that is but a small item of the matter. Does it never give thee pause, this other strange item of it, that men then had a _soul_--not by hearsay alone, and as a figure of speech; but as a truth that they _knew_ and practically went upon!"[345]