It was the complaint of a great many medieval chroniclers and moralists that monarchs too often chose inappropriate favourites. The chroniclers, as innately conservative as the barons themselves, wrote of men ‘raised from the dust’ to dazzling pre-eminence against all the strictures of the establishment. Walter of Guisborough used just this language when he referred to Piers Gaveston having been ‘raised up as if from nothing’. It was also a common refrain that kings spurned the counsel of the hoary heads. Both Edward II and Richard II were likened to King Rehoboam, who ‘followed the counsel of youths [and] lost the kingdom of Israel’. The Kirkstall chronicler drew an explicit comparison between the two men, when he wrote that Richard ignored mature advice in favour of inexperience, ‘rather like Edward of Caernarvon’. Indeed, the reign of Edward II is the most commonly cited example of a reign in which too little recognition was given to the needs of the realm and too much to the intimates of the king. Looking back on the reign from the vantage point of the seventeenth century, men such as Sir Francis Hubert, Sir Robert Howard and Nathaniel Crouch wrote histories of royal favourites, ‘that swarm of Sycophants that gap'd after greatness, and cared not to pawn their Souls to gain promotion’. Pamphlet wars during the 1640s led to the publication of a narrative of the Appellant Parliament (1386), as well as the reproduction of Bishop Merk's parliamentary speech from 1399 during which the fate of Richard II was debated (the note on the title page reads, ‘Thought seasonable to be published to this murmuring age’).