heraldryofyorkmi01custuoft

124.
THE HERALDRY OF YORK MINSTER.
" and to be brought up according to their name and rank in England
" But because riches and honours too often destroy fidelity amongst the
" nobility, the perfidious King, knowing that the youth now eighteen,
" fair in countenance, stalwart in body, and acceptable to the people
" had more right to the kingdom than he had, as being the son of his
" elder brother, and could easily acquire this on account of the hatred
" entertained as regards himself by Bretons and Angles alike, began to
" plot against the young man, that he might eradicate him from the midst.
" As therefore Saul treacherously treated the holy David, so that he might
" transfix him to the wall with a lance, so he ordered the boy, at supper
" with him, to stand in a narrow place between the table and the fire, in
" order that he might secretly stab him and drive him into the fire. But
" the spirit of innocence gave him a token of what the other was purposing,
" and for the time he escaped from the angry tyrant, half-burned.
" The impious man, therefore, purposing to carry out his conceived
" treachery so that it
might not be discovered, and careful so to do it that
" it
might not be noised abroad, took out one evening for a walk the young
" man instead of his esquire, and with him William de Vipont, Baron and
" Lord of Westmoreland, and, as the story goes, a miller.
They embarked
" in a boat on the sea, and when far away from human habitation, the
" wicked purpose was carried out by I know not whose hand.
" So, from his own land, as it were, cast out of the vineyard, was the
" true heir of England cast out and destroyed. His sister Alianore shared
" a similar fate, being
first in the custody of William de Vipont at the
" castle of Burgh in Westmoreland, then at Bowes, and afterwards at Corfe
" Castle, until her death."
Henry Knyghton, canon of Leicester, whose Chronicle extends to
year 1395, says "He (John) kept possession of Arthur, the son of his
" elder brother, Geoffry, Duke of Brittany, whom he had captured by
"stratagem when in Aquitaine, and killed him by the hand of "his squire,
" Peter de Malolacu, to whom he afterwards gave the heiress of the barony
" of Mulgrave in marriage as the reward of his iniquity." This is
quoted
by Dugdale in his Baronage.
In his Chronicon Anglicanum, Radulp de Coggeshall gives the following
account, in Latin (p. 139); "The councillors of the King perceiving
" that the Bretons would make much slaughter and sedition on all sides
" for their Lord Arthur, and that no sound agreement of peace could be
" concluded as long as Arthur survived, suggested to the King how far
" he might approve of it, that the noble young man might be blinded and
the
" mutilated, and thus rendered henceforth unfit for governing,
so that the
" opposing faction might be quieted from the madness of vigorous warfare,
" and submit themselves to the King. Exasperated, therefore, by incessant