THIS little work commemorates many happy leisure hours
spent amongst the Exchequer Records and in the Hertford-
shire 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 Hert-
fordshire 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 men-
tion 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 Curialis
conveys two wholly opposite meanings. To the one it
will recall the politic and scholarly entourage of a court

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