reconciliation between him and the English King, whose imperious will he had thwarted. The reconciliation was hollow. Before long France was filled with horror at the news of the murder of À Becket. Louis demanded vengeance from the Pope: Count Thibault wrote to the Roman pontiff that the ‘dogs of the Court had spilled the blood of the just’; the Bishop of Chartres excommunicated all the Continental possessions of the King of England. But it was not till three years later that hostilities broke out between France and England, when the three sons of Henry Plantagenet--Henry, Geoffrey and Richard Cœur-de-Lion--united with Louis and the Princes of Champagne against their father. That redoubtable coalition of Frenchmen, Chartrains, Champenois and Angevins was, however, no match for the English King. Beaten near Verneuil, Louis was obliged to make terms with his enemy in the following year (1174). The blood of the martyred À Becket had sprinkled his friend and secretary, John of Salisbury. ‘By the grace of God and the merits of the martyr, S. Thomas,’ as he himself expresses it, he was called to succeed William _aux Blanches-Mains_ in the bishopric of Chartres. The life of the great writer was nearly over when he came there, bringing with him, as a gift to the treasure of the Cathedral, a phial containing some drops of the blood of the master whom he had so faithfully served at Canterbury and followed in exile, and the dagger with which that master had been murdered. But, short as was his tenure of the See, he left his mark upon the history of Chartres. He overthrew the exorbitant pretensions of the secular lords who claimed as _choses_ of their domain all serfs set free by the Church, and thus rendered illusory the enfranchisement of ecclesiastical serfs, and he obtained for clerks brought to justice that they should henceforth not be condemned to undergo trial by ordeal, whether of duel, hot iron, or hot or cold water.