the chroniclers over the role of the Poitevins in England. This focus carried on into early 20th-century research into Henry, such as Kate Norgate's 1913 volume, which continued to make heavy use of the chronicler accounts and focused primarily on constitutional issues, with a distinctive nationalistic bias. After 1900, the financial and official records from Henry's reign began to become accessible to historians, including the pipe rolls, court records, correspondence and records of administration of the royal forests. Thomas Frederick Tout made extensive use of these new sources in the 1920s, and post-war historians brought a particular focus on the finances of Henry's government, highlighting his fiscal difficulties. This wave of research culminated in Sir Maurice Powicke's two major biographical works on Henry, published in 1948 and 1953, which formed the established history of the King for the next three decades. Henry's reign did not receive much attention from historians for many years after the 1950s: no substantial biographies of Henry were written after Powicke's, and the historian John Beeler observed in the 1970s that the coverage of Henry's reign by military historians remained particularly thin. At the end of the 20th century, there was a renewed interest in 13th-century English history, resulting in the publication of various specialist works on aspects of Henry's reign, including government finance and the period of his minority. Current historiography notes both Henry's positive and negative qualities: historian David Carpenter judges him to have been a decent man, who failed as a ruler because of his naivety and inability to produce realistic plans for reform, a theme echoed by Huw Ridgeway, who also notes his unworldliness and inability to manage his court, but who considers him to have been "essentially a man of peace, kind and merciful". Popular culture The chronicler Matthew Paris depicted Henry's life in a series of illustrations, which he sketched and, in some cases, water-coloured, in the margins of the Chronica Majora. Paris first met Henry in 1236 and enjoyed an extended relationship with the King, although he disliked many of Henry's actions and the illustrations are frequently unflattering. Henry is a character in Purgatorio, the second part of Dante's Divine Comedy (completed in 1320). The King is depicted sitting alone in purgatory, to one side of other failed rulers: Rudolf I of Germany, Ottokar II of Bohemia, Philip III of France and Henry I of Navarre, as well as