Excerpt from Court Life Under the Plantagenets

This little work commemorates many happy leisure hours spent amongst the Exchequer Records and in the Hertfordshire fields where was the favourite residence, seven hundred years ago, as it is to-day, of an English minister sprung from a line of great statesmen.

But although I had at first intended to follow the story of Richard Fitz Nigel in connection with his times, the want of historical material constrained me to choose another Hertfordshire worthy, a humbler Richard, as my hero, through whose adventures I have attempted to make the Reader familiar with Court Life in England at the close of the twelfth century.

It may be that at the outset many will take exception to a title of this sort applied to a work which contains no mention of some of the principal features of Court Life as it is now understood by us. The truth is, that to the mediæval student, and to the general reader, the title Liber Curiclis conveys two wholly opposite meanings.

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