POLITICAL HISTORY occupying London with an armed force to compel a settlement with the remains of de Montfort's party was no doubt a strong measure. But the armed demonstration of those days merely answered to a speech and vote against the government in these. He remained as a strong cham- pion of the baronial privileges which our age would count rank abuses, such as the right of waging private war, but which were perhaps essen- tial then to the strength of the class which could most effectually check royal power if pushed too far. One picturesque incident of the end of the civil war is related by Trivet as occurring upon the borders of Surrey. Adam de Gurdon, a baronial partisan, continued, he says, to hold Farnham Castle, and waged guerilla warfare, or brigandage, in the neighbourhood. Edward, the king's son, riding from Guildford, encountered him, in single combat away from his stronghold, induced him to submit, and brought him to Guildford, where he was received into his conqueror's service. 1 Gloucester took the cross with Edward, and went to Tunis, but like many of the crusaders returned thence when he found that St. Louis, whom they intended to join, was dead. Edward proceeded to Acre with only a few personal followers. De Warenne remained in England as a source of possible turmoil. In 1268, before the crusade, he attacked Alan de la Zouche and his son in the very precincts of the royal palace of Westminster, merely because the other was getting the better of him in a lawsuit, and wounded him so sorely that he died some time afterwards. De Warenne then shut himself up in Reigate Castle, and prepared to defy the king's justice. De Clare and Henry son of the king of the Romans hardly persuaded him to a grudging submission. In 1278 de Warenne further distinguished himself, up to a certain point, by a defiance of the government. The king, Edward I., issued the quo ivarranto writs, to the great indignation of the baronage, by which he made inquiry into the titles by which they held their lands and franchises. De Warenne's rusty sword flung upon the council table, and his bold assertion that as the Conqueror had won his land by the sword so the barons' ancestors had won theirs, and that for his part by the sword he would keep them, has passed into a commonplace of history. As de Warenne's name came only in the female line from a companion of the Con- queror, his father's father having been an illegitimate son of a count of Anjou, who owed all that he possessed in England to the mar- riage which Henry II. planned for him with the heiress of the de Warennes, the boast was rather an idle flourish, and it ended in nothing more so far as his Surrey estates were concerned. The Patent Rolls of 25 Eliz., July 9,* quote the answer of the earl, delivered by his attorney in much more decorous form before John de Reygate and 1 Nicholas Trivet, p. 269. The traditional form of the story that de Gurdon was an outlaw in the woods seems to be later. But the whole story is untrustworthy. See Genealogist, n.s. vol. iv.
- Quo tvarranto writs, 7 Edw. I. Exemplificatio Patent Rolls, 25 Eliz., July 9, Philip Howard Earl
of Arundel. 347
