“The citizens of Bristol, thus besieged (for she had surrounded the town), sent to ask Dame Isabelle her will, offering to surrender the city on condition that she would spare their lives and property. But she answered by her trumpeter, that she would agree to nothing unless they would first surrender the Earls of Winchester and Arundel; ‘for,’ saith she, ‘I am come purposely to destroy them.’ Then the citizens consulted together, and determined to save their lives and property by the sacrifice of the noblest blood in England, and (as it was shown afterwards) of the blood royal. They opened their gates, and yielded up my grandfather and thine to her will.”
Note 1. Hilding: a word derived from the Anglo-Saxon, and used indiscriminately to denote a young person of either sex.
Note 2. Wimple: the covering for the neck, worn by secular women as well as nuns, and either with or without a veil or hood. It had been in fashion for two centuries or thereabouts, but was now beginning to be generally discarded.
Note 3. In accordance with the custom of the time, by which persons were commonly named from their birth-places, Edward the First, the Second, and the Third are respectively designated Edward of Westminster, of Caernarvon, and of Windsor.
Note 4. The copped-hat was the high-crowned brimless hat then fashionable, the parent of the modern one. An instance of it will be found in the figure of Bolingbroke, plate xvi. of the illustrations to Cretan’s History of Richard the Second, Archaeologia, vol. xx.
Note 5. One historian after another has copied Froissart’s assertion that Hugh Le Despenser the elder at his death was an old man of ninety, and none ever took the trouble to verify the statement; yet the post-mortem inquisition of his father is extant, certifying that he was born in the first week in March 1261; so that on October 8, 1326, the day of his execution, he was only sixty-five.
Note 6. It will be understood that this was the light in which the monks regarded Earl Edmund.