Of all these authorities, only the first is of any real value. The German sources for this period are all mere monastic or ecclesiastical chronicles; the Annals of Marbach are among the best. The Acts of the Bishops of Halberstadt date from the thirteenth century. Reiner’s Annals are a section, ending in 1230, of a group of Chronicles of Liége; Reiner himself was born in 1155. The Additions to the Salzburg Annals are absolutely worthless; they are full of absurdities; and some of their statements about Richard are so obviously unhistorical that their German editor in his footnotes twice denounces them as “fables”—“Hoc jam fabulis plena de Richardi regis gestis” (p. 238)—“Iterum fabulae sequuntur prioribus pejores” (p. 240). Peter of Ebulo and William of Armorica can only have had their information at—to say the least—second hand, and from sources hostile to Richard; Peter was the panegyrist of Henry VI, William the historiographer of Philip Augustus; both, too, wrote in verse, and are open to the suspicion of a liberal use of poetic licence to exalt their respective heroes and diminish the glory of him who was the most illustrious rival of those two sovereigns. Had we only these six writers to deal with, we might be justified in treating the whole story as a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of an act of homage done to Henry by Richard for the kingdom of Burgundy, although, oddly enough, not one of them so much as mentions Burgundy at all. But Roger of Howden is not so easy to dispose of. He was a sober-minded and well-informed English historian, whose work in many places shows that he had access to the best official sources of contemporary information; in his case misunderstanding and misrepresentation on the subject are both alike almost inconceivable; and, moreover, his version of the matter is indirectly corroborated by another writer whose general accuracy and correct information rank as high, and whose facilities for learning the truth on this particular point were probably even greater than those of Roger himself. Ralf de Diceto (ii. 113) writes as follows: “Pactiones initae sunt plures inter imperatorem et regem, ad persolvendam non spectantes pecuniam, sed ad statum regis intervertendum; inter quas quicquid insertum est ab initio vitiosum, quicquid contra leges, contra canones, contra bonos mores indubitanter conceptum, licet ex parte regis et suorum fidelium ad hoc observandum fuerit jusjurandum adauctum, emissa licet patentia scripta, licet in mundum universitatis recepta, licet a partibus absoluta, quia tamen contra jus elicita robur firmitatis obtinere non debent in posterum, nec ullo tractu temporis convalescere.” These words seem distinctly to point to something more than homage merely for the kingdom of Arles, a homage which there could surely be no reason for Ralf or anyone else to denounce as so “vicious from the outset, so contrary to law, morality, and right” as to be utterly null and void.