Adam de Marisco, a pupil and disciple of the great Robert Grostete,
Bishop of Lincoln. His elder brothers had early left this wholesome
control; pushed forward by the sad circumstances that finally drove
their father to take up arms against the King, and strangers to the
noble temper that actuated him in his championship of the English
people, they became mere lawless rebels--fiercely profiting by his
elevation, not for the good of the people, but for their own
gratification.

Richard had been still a mere boy under constant control, and being
intelligent, spirited, and docile, had been an especial favourite
with his father. To him the great Earl had been the model of all
that was admirable, wise, and noble; deeply religious, just, and
charitable, and perfect in all the arts of chivalry and
accomplishments of peace--a tender and indulgent father, and a firm
and wise head of a household--he had been ardently loved and looked
up to by the young son, who had perhaps more in common with him by
nature than any other of the family.

Wrongs and injuries had been heaped upon Montfort by the weak and
fickle King, who would far better have understood him, if, like the
selfish kinsmen who encircled the throne, he had struggled for his
own advantage, and not for the maintenance of the Great Charter.
Richard was too young to remember the early days when his elder
brothers had been companions, almost on equal terms, to their first
cousins, the King's sons; his whole impression of his parents'
relations with the court was of injustice and perfidy from the King
and his counsellors, vehemently blamed by his mother and brothers,
but sometimes palliated by his father, who almost always, even at the
worst, pleaded the King's helplessness, and Prince Edward's