Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Council of the Camden Society desire it to be understood that they are not answerable for any opinions or observations that may appear in the Society's publications ; the Editors of the several works being alone responsible for the same. chapter{Section 4PREFACE. The work which is now for the first time printed is the most authentic of all those which have been attributed to Walter Mapes, and certainly the most important. It is the book in which this remarkable man seems to have amused himself with putting down his own sentiments on the passing events of the day, along with the popular gossip of the courtiers with whom he mixed. It contains almost the only authentic details we have relating to the life of its author, besides a great mass of historical anecdotes which are entirely new to us. In fact, the whole book is one mass of contemporary anecdote, romance, and popular legend, interesting equally by its curiosity and by its novelty. In my Biographia Britannica Literaria (the Anglo-Norman Period), I have given a summary of the information with which Mapes in this treatise furnishes us relating to himself, and I need do little more than repeat here what I said on that occasion. The correct form of his name appears to have been Map, but as the Latinised form Mapes has obtained a very extensive degree of popularity, I have thought it was perhaps better to retain it. He was a native of the borders of Wales, probably of Gloucestershire or Herefordshire ; and his parents, he tells us, had rendered important services to King Henry both before and after his accession to the throne.f Mapes studied in the University of Paris, where, as he informs us, he was witness to many of the tumults between the scholars and the townsmen ;J and he tells us in another part of his work that...