This noble and mighty King Edward, among all other men of nobility in the world, was a man of great goodness called gracious, excelling all his predecessors by virtue and grace given to him of God, a bold man in heart, dreading not sinister fortune in battles, having great fortune in them both by sea and land. Also he was meek, benign, and familiar to all manner of people, devout to God, honouring the church of God, and having his ministers in great reverence. Also he was moderate in cures temporal, provide in council, affable and eloquent, meek in behaviour, having compassion on men in tribulation. Also he was elegant and beauteous of body, having a comfortable and pleasant countenance, like to the sight of an angel, for God had endued him with such excellence of grace that a man would have thought as for a surety that he should have sped well in the day following after that he had dreamed of the said King. This noble King governed his reign gloriously unto his later days, large in gifts, excessive in expenses, endued with all honesty of manners. Whereof his fame was so increased among people of Barbary, insomuch that they said there was no land in the world that had so noble a prince, and that England should never have so noble again after his death. But the inordinate lust of the flesh used in his old age helped him much unto death. Also it is to be attended, as the acts afore express, that like as in his beginning all things enjoyed to him, and in the midst of his age glorious and fortunate, so the said King drawing to age and towards death, all things were as unfortunate to him, for his sins and many incommodities began to spring, having after him long continuation, which thing was to be sorrowed. THE PEASANTS' REVOLT (1381). SOURCE.--_Chronicle of Adam of Usk_ (translated and edited by Sir E. Maunde Thompson, 1904), 13. During this King Richard's reign great things were looked for. But he, being of tender years, others, who had the care of him and his kingdom, did not cease to inflict on the land acts of wantonness, extortions, and unbearable wrongs. Whence sprang that unnatural deed, when the commons of the land and especially those of Kent and Essex, under their wretched leader Jack Straw, declaring that they could no longer bear such wrongs, and above all wrongs of taxes and subsidies, rose in overwhelming numbers against the lords and the King's officers, and, marching to London on the eve of Corpus Christi [June 12], in the year of our Lord 1381, struck off the heads of Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, then the King's Chancellor, Sir Robert Hales the treasurer, and many others, hard by the Tower of London. And on the places where these lords were beheaded there are set up to this day two marble crosses, a lasting memorial of so monstrous a deed.