The use which some of the Latin chroniclers and verse-makers make of the words _caudatus_ and _cauda_ suggests that the former of these may have been intended to bear the sense of "cowed" or "coward", and the latter to symbolize the evil qualities, more particularly, perhaps, the treachery ascribed to the English. Thus, in Matthew of Paris, one, at least, of Count Robert's insulting outbursts, though hardly both, remains perfectly intelligible even if a figurative rather than a literal meaning be given to the epithet.[337] And, again, when John Oxenedes, in his account of the battle of Lewes, fought, in 1264, between Henry III and the Barons, under Simon of Montfort, places it in immediate juxtaposition to "full of guile", "false", "unstable", and "dispirited", it seems more natural to interpret it as a reference to a moral defect than to take it as a taunt at a physical deformity.[338] As regards the substantive, a symbolical sense, not, indeed, excluding the primary meaning, but rather taken in combination with it, is obviously consistent with the anonymous poetaster's advice to "cut off that poisonous tail".[339] And the _Annales Gandenses_, the most noteworthy chronicle of the closing years of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, whilst doubtless alluding to the popular belief in a real caudal appendage worn by Englishmen, seem to employ the word metaphorically in the passage which records the incendiarism and the looting by which the troops of Edward I disgraced themselves in Ghent, where they had been cordially received and hospitably entertained by the inhabitants in 1298. "The English, like the most ungrateful men that they were," says the Minorite author, "dragging after them their habitual tail, and eager to plunder the town of Ghent and to slay those that resisted them, set fire to it in four places, at the four corners, so to speak, in order that the people of Ghent, whilst endeavouring to extinguish the conflagration, should be less careful about the custody of their property."[340] In the _Eulogium Historiarum_, too, there is a passage where the word _cauda_ occurs in such a connection as to make it quite clear that the literal acceptation would be out of place, the more so, indeed, from the circumstance that the "tail" is bestowed, not on an Englishman, but on a Scot, and on a Scot no less genuine than Robert the Bruce. Referring to the capture and punishment of the Scottish King's adherents, the chronicler adds that Bruce himself found safety in flight and concealment, but that this did not in the least trouble Edward, who, now that his enemy's tail was completely cut off, was quite willing that he should wander about, wherever he found it easiest to save his life.[341] And if, in this instance, the amputation of the tail is a figure of speech intended to convey the notion of reducing to powerlessness, it might be argued, with some show of reason, that, even