This Mount, from the time of King Edward the Confessor to the middle of the reign of King Richard I. for the space of 150 years, was a sacred nursery of religion; but then, notwithstanding the sanctity thereof, and the guardianship of St. Michael, it was seized by one Henry de la Pomeray, Lord of Berry-Pomeray in Devon, and Tregony Pomeray in this county, being distasted at the government of King Richard I. as many others were, by reason of the Pope’s request he engaged in the Holy War, and forsook his kingdom, leaving for his vicegerent William Longchamp, a Norman Bishop of Ely; who had extorted great sums of money from the people in his absence, without a Parliament; and moreover so insulted over the nobility and gentry of this kingdom in his office, that he discontented the greatest part of them; and to countenance his grandeur he seldom rode abroad with less than a thousand attendants. Those and others his exorbitances gave occasion to John Earl of Cornwall and others to fall into treasonable practices, and of this number it seems this Sir Pomeray was one, who not only informed the King beyond the seas of these topping, magisterial, and illegal practices of Longchamp at home, but that by reason thereof King Philip of France, in those distractions, took occasion with a great army of soldiers to invade Normandy, and had taken the town of Guisors and many other places by force and arms, and would reduce the whole province in short while (if not resisted) to his dominion. Whereupon the King, in answer, by his letters patent, deposed Longchamp from his authority, and placed the Archbishop of Rouen in his place, when soon after Longchamp, in women’s apparel, made his escape into his own country, but was detected and shrewdly beaten with rods before his departure out of England, by the women there. Longchamp, as tradition saith, having notice that de la Pomeray was in confederacy with Earl John, who under pretence of opposing his vice-government, designed the usurpation of King Richard’s Crown, (though he had told him that in case his brother should die, before he returned into his kingdom, without issue, that the right of succession was in Arthur Duke of Britany, his elder brother’s son, not him,) sent a sergeant at arms to the castle of Berry Pomeray in Devon, where he then resided, in order to arrest and take him into custody, which he no sooner did but Pomeray stabbed him to the heart, of which wound he instantly died. Upon which tragical accident the murderer fled into Cornwall, where he had great possessions in lands, and besides twelve lordships held by the tenure of knight service. And there cast himself upon his amicus, John Earl of that province, who as tradition saith secretly supplied him with divers men at arms to secure his person against his enemy the Viceroy, which accordingly they did till Longchamp was displaced.