The was made to patch up the quarrel by peaceful means. questions in dispute were to be referred to three arbitrators— two Frenchmen and one Englishman; and meantime, young Edward and his cousin Henry, Richard's son, remained in the hands of the barons as hostages for their fathers. While Henry lay in custody, Montfort issued writs in the king's name for a Parliament which met in the beginning of the next year. To this Parliament there were sum 1265 moned, besides the nobles and the higher clergy, two knights from each shire, and two burgesses from each of the chief cities. This was the first occasion on which the Commons were recognized in connection with the Great Council of the nation; and although their presence there was not continuous, their right to take part in the work of legislation and government was now fully conceded. Thus the last, and in one sense the greatest, element was added to the Parliament of England. Monarch, lords spiritual, lords temporal, knights of the shire, were joined by the representatives of the rich and busy towns, with which, in spite of civil war and sweeping taxes, the land had become thickly studded. The escape of Edward gave a new turn to the war. Blocked up on every side, and disappointed in aid he expected from his son, whom the royalists surprised by night near Kenilworth,* old Leicester stood gallantly at bay near Evesham † on the Avon. Having prayed and taken the sacrament, "Sir Simon Dudley Malvern Stourbridge Kidderminster Droitwich Worcester BIRMINGHAM Kenilworth, Warwick, Stratford об Evesham Tewkesbury Cheltenham Gloucester *Kenilworth, a market town of Warwickshire, four and a half miles from Warwick. It is noted for its magnificent castle, which was a stronghold of the Montforts, and was the scene of Dudley's splendid hospitality to Queen Elizabeth. Evesham, a borough on the Avon in Worcestershire, fifteen miles from Worcester. It was originally called Eovesham. August 4, the Righteous," as the Commons loved to call their wise and virtuous champion, formed his troops into a solid circle, and for a time baffled every charge of the foe. When his horse sank dead below him, the old man fought on foot with a courage that never quailed. His son fell. His friends lay in ghastly heaps around. There was nothing left him but to die, and he died sword in hand. A butchery of his surviving partisans stained the victory of the royalists, who wreaked a pitiful revenge on the popular hero by hacking off his head and limbs. Thus Montfort fell. The England of his own day loved him well, and in secret cherished his memory long. That is the best evidence that the movement he headed was in reality a national one. 1265 The death of Henry, whom this battle restored to freedom and an untroubled throne, followed in 1272. Prince Edward had gone, two years earlier, to share in the perils and questionable glories of the eighth and last 1272 Crusade. CHAPTER IX. ROGER BACON. At college-Settled at Oxford-What Bacon knew-Gunpowder---The telescope-Spectacles-A wise Pope-Opus Majus-The charge of magicIn prison-Bacon's death-Michael Scott. N 1214, the year before John signed Magna Carta, a boy IN was born near Ilchester in Somersetshire, whose name has come to be associated in a remarkable way with science in the Middle Ages. At a fitting age he entered the schools of Oxford, whence he passed to be finished at the University of Paris, then the great centre of European learning. His student life is to us a blank; but we can easily fancy the restless brain of the young Englishman, already teeming with daring and independent thought, chafing and fretting against the formalism of the Aristotelian philosophy, which then absorbed the mental energies of almost all the learned world. Roger Bacon-so the young student was called-being no mean linguist, went deep into Aristotle in the Greek, and saw enough to convince him that the philosopher of Stagira was treated most unjustly by modern translators. "Oh," he writes in a fit of rage, I would burn every translation if I could." 1240 At the age of twenty-six, Bacon returned to Oxford, when he assumed the gray robe of the Franciscans, at the instance, it is thought, of Robert Grostête (Greathead), Bishop of Lincoln, who was esteemed a notable mathematician. Within his quiet cell at Oxford, Bacon devoted himself to study and experiment, spending, as he tells us, two thousand pounds in twenty years on books and instruments, the necessary material for his scientific toil. How much Friar Bacon really knew becomes an important question in dealing with the state of science in medieval England. But it must not be forgotten that he shone like a solitary light in a mass of the thickest darkness. Astrologers and alchemists were not wanting in England, who worked on blindly, little aware that in their search for gold and immortality they were clearing the way for the foundations of two great departments of natural science-astronomy and chemistry. And Bacon, bitten too with the gold-fever, bent many a night over the coloured flames of the glowing crucible in search of that magic stone that was never found. But Bacon shot far into the future in his scientific knowledge. We do not wonder so much at his acquaintance with the nature and effect of a substance resembling gunpowder, of which he tells us that "with an instrument as large as the human thumb, by the violence of the salt called saltpetre, so horrible a noise is made by the rupture of so slight a thing as a bit of parchment, that it is thought to exceed loud thunder, and the flash is stronger than the brightest lightning." It is undoubted that several of the Asiatic nations-the Arabs and the Chinese, for example-knew and wrote of this explosive substance long before its introduction into Europe. But when we find the distinct germ of those huge telescopes which now pierce the deeps of space, and turn the white dust of the Milky Way into clusters of blazing suns, developing itself in the little laboratory of this gray-robed monk of Oxford more than three centuries before Galileo was born, we feel indeed that Roger Bacon was a man far in advance of his age, and we hesitate not to class him, as a scientific explorer, side by side with his illustrious namesake of the Elizabethan time. Although we know certainly from his writings that he understood the action of glass lenses upon the rays of light, we have no proof that he made a telescope however rude. With the single magnifying lens or simple microscope he was, of course, quite familiar. The words containing his idea of the telescope possess much interest : "We can so shape transparent substances, and so arrange them, with respect to our sight and objects, that rays can be broken and bent as we please, so that objects may be seen far off or near, under whatever angle we please; and thus from an incredible distance we may read the smallest letters, and number the grains of dust and sand, on account of the greatness of the angle under which we see them; and we may manage so as hardly to see bodies when near to us, on account of the smallness of the angle under which we cause them to be seen; for vision of this sort is not a consequence of distance, except as that affects the magnitude of the angle. And thus a boy may seem a giant, and a man a mountain." The first application of lenses in aid of defective sight-that is, the invention of spectacles-seems, from the way in which Bacon speaks of this important subject, to belong to an earlier day. The fame of Friar Bacon spread far and wide; but with fame was coupled that penalty which every man of superior knowledge paid in the Middle Ages for his renown. A belief fell upon men that the Franciscan had nightly dealings with the Fiend; and luxurious monks crossed themselves with pious awe when they saw Brother Roger looking through bits of glass, or gazing with rapt face on a rainbow embroidering the dusky sky. There were, however, men in Europe who appreciated Roger Bacon. When in 1265 a French priest, who had once been English legate, assumed the tiara as Clement the Fourth, he remembered the studious monk of whom he had heard so much, and whose writings Franciscan jealousy and suspicion had prevented from reaching him. At the request of this distinguished and liberal pontiff, Bacon sat down to write his Opus Majus, for |