The Illumination is in the same style as the surrender of Bristol, exhibiting great care in the landscape, to the picturesque features of which the artist seems to have paid peculiar attention. His castles, for instance, are never represented as new, as in many other MSS. is always the case; but the weather stains are introduced with clever and pleasing tinting, and the parasitic weeds or climbing plants, the tenants of old walls, are made to minister to the general picturesqueness of the composition, each in its proper situation, with almost the skill of a modern landscape painter.
[Illustration: <f>Bristol surrenders to Queen Isabella &c&c.</f>]
This Illumination represents a group of citizens, assembled at one of the principal gates, in the act of surrendering the city to the Queen and her party. The whole picture forms a beautiful and spirited representation of the period;--the town gate, the turreted walls, the house roofs, with the gray cathedral towering above them--the civic costumes of the citizens, the brilliant armour and rich housings of the knights and their horses, surrounding the Queen, and the characteristic treatment of the distant landscape--all tend to exhibit with wonderful faithfulness the striking features of an epoch, of which we have no other pictorial record than the Illuminations contained in the wonderful manuscripts of the period.
[Illustration: <f>Robert Bruce sends a defiance to Edward III.</f>]
ROBERT BRUCE, KING OF SCOTLAND, DEFIES KING EDWARD III.
“It happened that Robert, King of Scotland, who, though brave, had suffered much in his wars with England, having often been defeated by King Edward, grandfather of the young king, being at this time very old, and afflicted with leprosy, hearing that the King (Edward II.) had been taken prisoner, and deposed, and his counsellors put to death, thought this a favourable opportunity to send a defiance to the present King, as yet a youth, whose barons were not on good terms with each other, and to attempt the conquest of some part of England. About Easter, 1327, he sent a defiance to King Edward and all the country; informing them that he would enter the kingdom, and burn it as far as he had done before, after the defeat of Stirling.”