chapel at Westminster, and the Eastminster for Cistercian nuns hard by
Tower hill. A fluent and eloquent speaker in French and English, Edward
was also conversant with Latin, and perhaps Low-Dutch. Yet no king was
less given to study or seclusion. Possessed, perhaps, of no exceptional
measure of intellectual capacity, and not even endowed to any large
extent with firmness of character, he won a great place in history by
the extraordinary activity of his temperament and the vigour and energy
with which he threw himself into whatever work he set his hand to do. He
was a consummate master of knightly exercises, delighting in
tournaments, and especially in those which were marked by some touch of
quaintness or fancy. He had the hereditary passion of his house for the
chase. In his youthful campaigns in Scotland and in his maturer
expeditions in France, he was accompanied by a little army of falconers
and huntsmen, by packs of hounds, and many hawks trained with the utmost
care. He honoured with his special friendship an Abbot of Leicester,
famed throughout England as the most dexterous of hare-coursers.[2]

[1] _Continuation of Murimuth_ (Engl. Hist. Soc.), pp. 225-27,
which gives the best contemporary description of Edward's
character.

[2] Knighton, ii., 127.

Edward's abounding energy was even more gladly devoted to war than to
the chase. He was an admirable exponent of those chivalric ideals which
are glorified in the courtly pages of Froissart. Not content with the
easy victories which fall in the tiltyard to the crowned king, Edward
was anxious to show that his triumphs belonged to the knight and not to
the monarch, and more than once jousted victoriously in disguise. The
same spirit led him to challenge Philip of France to decide their