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The Palace of Flowers came into existence in 1459, just on the eve of a period of natural calamities which culminated in famine and pestilence. In 1462, these conditions were at their worst. From various, provinces people flocked to the capital seeking food, and deaths from starvation became frequent in the city.

The Duke of Urbino here depicted is Federigo da Montefeltro, who ruled from 1444 to 1482, and in 1459 married as his second wife a daughter of Alessandro Sforza, of Pesaro, the wedding being the occasion of Piero's pictures. The duke stands out among the many Italian lords of that time as a humane and beneficent ruler and collector, and eager to administer well.

In the reign of Philip the Good, the vicar of the inquisitor- general gave sentence against some heretics, who were burned in Lille . In 1459, Pierre Troussart, a Jacobin monk, condemned many Waldenses, together with some leading citizens of Artois, accused of sorcery and heresy.

In 1458 he attacked some vessels which were under a treaty of peace with England, and being summoned to London to answer before the king, was violently attacked by the followers of Somerset and barely escaped with his life. In 1459 the civil war finally broke out. In the first campaign the Yorkists failed, owing to their inactivity.

The Church is no longer able to protect itself against the secular aim. The halcyon days of ban, book and candle, are gone. In 1459, Duke Philip of Burgundy prohibits the churches from affording protection to fugitives. Charles the Bold, in whose eyes nothing is sacred save war and the means of making it, lays a heavy impost upon all clerical property.

This must not be confused with the Boar's Head of Shakespeare, which stood in Eastcheap on the other side of the river, though it is a remarkable coincidence that it was in the latter inn the dramatist laid the scene of Prince Hal's merrymaking with the Sir John Falstaff we all know. The earliest reference to the Southwark Boar's Head occurs in the Paston Letters under date 1459.

In the mean time, Gutenberg, undaunted by the loss of all that had cost him so many years of unremitted application and his whole fortune, began afresh; and this time, it should seem, with better success, as we find him, in 1459, undertaking to present, for certain considerations, all the books he had then printed, or might thereafter print, to a convent where his sister was a nun.

It is now a farmhouse, but its two battlemented towers proclaim its former importance as the chief seat of the family of Metcalfe. The date of the house is about 1459, and the walls of the western tower are 4 feet in thickness.

Their family took its rise from a certain Adhemar de Noailles, <capitoul> of Toulouse, ennobled, according to all appearance, by the exercise of his charge in 1459. The grandfather of these Noailles was a domestic of M. de Turenne's, and his family was patronized at court by madame de Maintenon. Everybody knows this. But to return to my presentation.

The church was built in 1323. The monastery is now half barracks and half hospital. Between 1455 and 1459, the façade of S. Agostino in the same town was built as an addition to a church of 1338, which also is now a barrack. The foliage, twisted columns, and canopies are a good deal like the earlier work at Sebenico.