‘Listen,’ cried the friar, ‘to the tragical history of Castle Beaumont, and may Christ and the Blessed Virgin and All Hallows grant it be to the health and comfort of your souls. ‘Five days’ journey hence into the West country stood Castle Beaumont, and it was the fairest and strongest castle that any man had ever seen. It was built on the crest of a great hill so high that its towers, like those of the proud Babel, seemed to threaten the Heavens, and so stoutly of hard hewn stone, and so cunningly with barbicans, bastions and battlements and broad moats, that it might not be taken, nay, though even the Lord King himself came against it with tens of thousands of men and with mangonels, belfries, and rams. Above it was naught but the wide and naked heaven; below it, richly clothing the slopes of the great hill, lay a forest of oak and beech; below the forest lay a wide water, and a mile over the meadows, this side of the water, lay a poor village called Vill Beaumont. ‘The Lord of Beaumont was rich and mighty above all the nobles in this realm, for east and west, and south and north, as far as one might ride on a long summer’s day, one’s horse would not step on an ell of land that was not his. A score of stone castles and thirty walled towns owned him allegiance, and he milked the fatness from a hundred and fifty rich manors. When he rode forth to war there rode with him a hundred knights in full harness and five hundred men-at-arms in helmets and hauberks of twisted mail, so that there was no lord in the land who could stand against him. ‘But lo, this Lord, of whom I speak, was a man of stark and violent heart, swollen with pride and vain imagination, a fearer of neither God nor man. For him Christ and His Church might not have been; he took no thought for his soul but lived as a beast of the field, subject to his own unlawful lusts and desires. Fierce moods came upon him like lightning at midsummer, but aye more harmful, and he was more stark and terrible in his rages than a roaring lion. If one vexed him, he would gnash upon him with his teeth and strike him with his fist even to the breaking of bones, or if so be that he might not come at him, he would hurl himself down upon the rushes and bite upon them with his teeth, smiting himself upon the face and dashing his head against the floor.