PLATE VI.
BRISTOL SURRENDERS TO QUEEN ISABELLA.
This Illumination represents a group of citizens, assembled at one of the principal gates, in the act of surrendering the city to the Queen and her party. The whole picture forms a beautiful and spirited representation of the period;—the town gate, the turreted walls, the house roofs, with the gray cathedral towering above them—the civic costumes of the citizens, the brilliant armour and rich housings of the knights and their horses, surrounding the Queen, and the characteristic treatment of the distant landscape—all tend to exhibit with wonderful faithfulness the striking features of an epoch, of which we have no other pictorial record than the Illuminations contained in the wonderful manuscripts of the period.
Robert Bruce sends a defiance to Edward III.