The depredation and burning of the abbey of St Edmund and of the manors, with the secret abduction of the abbot into Brabant, and concerning certain events of that time.

In the year of Our Lord thirteen hundred and twenty-six, in the octave of the kalends of October, Queen Isabella of England – that is, the wife of King Edward the Second since the Conquest – with her firstborn son Edward (that is, Edward the Third), a boy of fifteen years, the duke of Aquitaine, landed in England at Walton, since she feared the betrayal of the Frenchmen corrupted by money. She was accompanied by Edmund, earl of Kent the brother of King Edward the Second, by the Lord Roger Mortimer (who had previously fled from the Tower of London in which he had been imprisoned with his uncle of the same name), by the Lord John de Cromwell, the Lord John of Hainault (the brother of the count of the same region), and by many other Englishmen and foreigners. They fled the guardians which the lord king had placed there, that is to say Robert de Wateville and others. And on St Michael's Day the queen came with her retinue to St Edmunds. But the king, when he had met with a few of them, had had the victory; but on account of ill counsel he fled towards Wales with the Lord Hugh Despenser, his son and other citizens. And the queen pursued him with her followers, and her retinue or power was continually being multiplied, while that of the others was diminished.

At last, arriving at Bristol, she ordered him and his son to yield the castle, in which the Lord Hugh Despenser (the father) had been most vilely treated and hanged. The queen, it was said, had wanted to save him, but friends of Thomas, earl of Lancaster (who was the judge at his execution), dissuaded her. And thus proceeding towards Wales, and beside the castle of Caerphilly, they took Hugh Despenser's son, the king's councillor, and dragged and greatly afflicted him, and at last hanged him. And thus they did not cease until they had taken King Edward the Second since the Conquest – who, having been captured, was placed in evil custody in Berkeley Castle until his death.