It is here, with Mr. Hall, the same as elsewhere. His work is marred, throughout, by that confusion of thought which makes it almost impossible to learn what he really means. In any case my own position is clear. I assert that the note by Matthew Paris refers, not to the narrative of the coronation, which he derived from the ‘Gesta,’ but to a description of the “services”; and I hold that he found this description, not in a lost Exchequer record, but in the Red Book’s account of Queen Eleanor’s coronation. X The Struggle of John and Longchamp (1191) It is needless to insist on the critical character of the year 1191 in England. From the moment when the watchers on the coast of Sicily had seen the passing of Richard, this country found itself, for the first time, cut off, for all purposes, from communication with its king. The sovereign had gone, and his seal with him; and ministerial government, a government by officials, was thrown on its own resources. If Henry and his grandfather had taught their subjects faithfully to obey the ministers of the Crown, with the king ever at their back, the case was altered when the king had left them for a distant land. And men’s thoughts turned to John, not only as the visible representative, in his brother’s absence, of his house, but as not improbably their future king, and that, it might be, before long. John, traitor at heart, saw the strength of his position, and Longchamp was far too clever to ignore the danger of his own. To the tale of their inevitable strife for power, the acknowledged master of that age’s history has devoted special care. In his edition of the ‘Gesta Regis Ricardi’ (1867), and again in that of Hoveden (1870), he has given the conclusions at which he arrived concerning the order of events in 1191. We have, in the former, the footnote to vol. ii., pp. 208–9, and in the latter, pp. lvi.-lxiv. of the preface to vol. iii., and the “long note” on pp. 134–5 of the text. The last of these is perhaps the one which sets forth most fully and clearly the final conclusions of the bishop. These conclusions, I may add at once, have been accepted without question by Mr. Howlett, in his ‘William of Newburgh’ (1884)[434] and his ‘Richard of Devizes’ (1886),[435] by Miss Norgate in her ‘England under the Angevin Kings’ (ii. 298–301) and her Life of Longchamp,[436] and by Mr. Hunt in his Life of John.[437] Summing up the narratives found in the ‘Gesta,’ Hoveden, Richard of Devizes, and William of Newburgh, Dr. Stubbs holds that their “divergency arises from the fact of the struggle falling into two campaigns, in which certain details are repeated. There were three conferences at Winchester, two attempts on the chancellor’s part to seize the castle of Lincoln, and two settlements.” He then gives “the harmonized dates, on this hypothesis, in detail.”