of the new arrangements was immediately put to the test.  Despenser, the justiciary, came from the Tower, put himself at the head of the associated bands, and conducted them to destroy the two palaces of the King of the Romans, at Isleworth and Westminster, and the houses of the nobility and citizens known or suspected to be attached to the royal cause.  The justices of the king’s bench and the barons of the exchequer were thrown into prison; the moneys belonging to foreign merchants and bankers, which for security had been deposited in the churches, were carried to the Tower; and the Jews, to the number of five hundred, men, women, and children, were conducted to a place of confinement.  Out of these, Despenser selected a few of the more wealthy, that he might enrich himself by their ransom; the rest he abandoned to the cruelty and rapacity of the populace, who, after stripping them of their clothes, massacred them all in cold blood.  Cock ben Abraham, who was considered the most opulent individual in the kingdom, had been killed in his own house by John Fitz-John, one of the barons.  The murderer at first appropriated to himself the treasure of his victim; but he afterward thought it more prudent to secure a moiety, by making a present of the remainder to Leicester.[61]

Henry had summoned the tenants of the crown to meet him at Oxford; and being joined by Comyn, Bruce, and Baliol, the lords of the Scottish borders, unfurled his standard and placed himself at the head of the army.  His first attempts were successful.  Northampton, Leicester, and Nottingham, three of the strongest fortresses in the possession of the barons, were successively reduced; and among the captives were reckoned Simon the eldest of Leicester’s sons, fourteen other bannerets, forty knights, and a numerous body of esquires.  From Nottingham he was recalled into Kent by the danger of his nephew Henry, besieged in the castle of Rochester, At his approach the enemy, who had taken and pillaged the city, retired with precipitation; and the King, after an ineffectual attempt to secure the cooeperation of the Cinque Ports, fixed his head-quarters in the town of Lewes.

Leicester, having added a body of fifteen thousand citizens to his army, marched from London, with a resolution to bring the controversy to an issue.  From Fletching he despatched a letter to Henry, protesting that neither he nor his associates had taken up arms against the King, but against the evil counsellors who enjoyed and abused the confidence of their sovereign.  Henry returned a public defiance, which was accompanied by a message from Prince Edward and the King of the Romans, declaring in the name of the royal barons that the charge was false; pronouncing Montfort and his adherents perjured; and daring the earls of Leicester and Derby to appear in the King’s court and prove their assertion by single combat.  After the observation of these forms, which the feudal connection between the lord and the vassal was supposed to make