280. See note on l. 231.
326 f. An allusion to the campaign of 1380.
328 f. Referring especially to the very popular naval victory of Arundel in 1387 (Walsingham, ii. 154).
340. That is, in the twenty-first year of the reign (1397).
Tercia Pars
17. This comparison of Richard’s proceedings to the work of a mole under the ground (see also l. 12, margin) is appropriate enough as a description of the plot which he undoubtedly laid against the liberties of the kingdom, but the comparison is perhaps chiefly intended to suggest that Richard, and not Henry, was the ‘talpa ore dei maledicta’ of prophecy (Glendower’s ‘mould-warp’), cp. Archaeologia, xx. p. 258.
27 ff. This refers to the appointment of a committee with full powers to deal with the petitions and other matters left unfinished in this parliament. The committee consisted of twelve lords, of whom six should be a quorum, and six commons, three to be a quorum: see Rot. Parl. iii. 368, Annales Ric. II, p. 222[819]. The latter authority accuses the king of altering the Rolls of Parliament ‘contra effectum concessionis praedictae.’
35 ff. Cp. Annales Ric. II, p. 225.
47. Que non audiuit auris, &c. The same expression is used by Adam of Usk about the king’s proceedings in this parliament at Shrewsbury (p. 17).
49 ff. These transactions are related, but not very intelligibly, in the continuation of the Eulogium Historiarum, iii. 378. It seems that the king summoned the archbishop and bishops to his Council at Nottingham, and used their influence to obtain from the city of London and the seventeen counties adjacent acknowledgements of guilt and payments of money to procure pardon. After this the king ordered that the archbishops, bishops, abbots, &c., and also the individual citizens of towns, should set their seals to blank parchments, wherein afterwards a promise to keep the statutes of the last parliament was inscribed, to which it was supposed that the king intended to add acknowledgements placing the persons in question and their property at his own disposal: cp. Monk of Evesham, p. 147. These last are the ‘blanche-chartres’ spoken of below called ‘blanke chartours’ in Gregory’s Chronicle, p. 101, where the form of submission sent in by the city of London, ‘in plesauns of the kynge and by conselle and helpe of Syr Roger Walden, Archebischoppe of Cauntyrbury ande Syr Robert Braybroke, Byschoppe of London,’ is given in full, pp. 98-100. See also Rot. Parl. iii. 426, 432, where they are referred to as ‘les Remembrances appellez Raggemans ou blanches Chartres.’