The wide chimneys and a portion of the great staircase yet remain, as likewise the fine flight of steps by which the priors reached their oratory, built above the northern aisle of the choir; and to which Prior Bolton added the exquisite oriel window still extant with his quaint rebus-a bolt in a tun wrought in the stonework. The upper portion of the house, now ceaselessly trod by fringemakers, was the dormitory and the infirmary of the monastery. It is interesting still to trace the marks of the partition which divided the one from the other, and the little fire-place of the monks' sick chamber. Of course, such an arrangement must have been fraught with immense sanitary evils, particularly in connexion with the loathsome diseases of the middle ages, such as leprosy and scrofula, with the latter of which all monasteries were plague-ridden. But in those days, ventilation as well as domestic and personal cleanliness were things comparatively unknown; and we who have seen a vast number of old places, castles, monasteries, halls, houses, and therein the squalid chambers, and the utter absence of ventilation and all means of decency, do not so much marvel that there were desolating plagues, as that one man in a thousand escaped.

Beside, and at the rear of the prior's house ran, there is reason to think, the famous mulberry-garden, as round the church itself was a grassy graveyard, decked with trees. For in a few rare prints still existing, one taken from the Froissart MSS., the others relative to Wat Tyler's rebellion, the priory walls are always shown as partly overgrown with trees. The churchyard was a celebrated place; in it were held many of the great scholarly meetings of the middle ages-the scholars of one great monastic school disputing with another, on abstruse points of scholastic theology. Stow mentions one of these meetings-the scholars seated on the sward beneath the trees; a portion of the disputants belonging to the celebrated school of St. Anthony, in Threadneedle Street, where Sir Thomas More received his education, and on the site of which now stands the Hall of Commerce.

Near the southern aisle of the choir stood the chapter-house, in which undoubtedly many matters relative to the great questions we are approaching were discussed. Near this, again, were the cloisters, of magnificent size and proportion, occupying the four sides of a square of a hundred feet, the central area verdant with the customary plot of turf. Portions of the eastern cloister alone remain; these are buried amidst the filthiness of cowsheds, stables, knackers' yards, carpenters' shops; part is turned into a saw-pit, the rest choked up with planks and ponderous beer-barrels. Yet amidst such desolation, enough remains of the exquisitely groined roof and springing arches, to give an idea of these cloisters in their original condition, and when they opened from the southern nave of the choir, with one airy Norman span of surpassing beauty. What exquisite places for meditative thought cloisters like these must have been; and not, we may be sure, productive solely of debasing superstition and scholastic quibbles. Here, looking at history from an inductive point of view, more

important points than any contained in the Analytics of Aristotle were meditated, as the centuries drew near to that one of the great emancipation of the human mind; and though it is not all men that can speak out the truths that burn within their hearts, though the very creed of their Church made the casuistry of difference between belief and speech permissible, still here we think, within retreats like these, many of those priceless truths that Wycliffe preached and Sautre died for were meditated, and in time believed. Be it recollected as an axiom, that evils generate frequently their own remedies, and that from out of a nation of bondsmen arise the free; whilst never yet the corn grew, the harvest came, without the long and hidden germination of the seed.

In making a sewer beneath the pavement, some eight or nine years ago, a line of gigantic stone coffins was found, apparently running the whole length of the cloisters. It was not customary to bury the monastic dead thus, and therefore this discovery affords matter for antiquarian conjecture. We saw one of these in the earth, and yet occupied by its long and solemn guest; others then recently dug up were reared on end, with visible relics within them of Rahere's shaven canons, perhaps, amongst others, of him who had written of the man "born of low kindred," so quaintly, yet so well.

But the grandest feature of the monastery, exclusive of the choir, was the refectory. It was of great length and height, and perhaps coeval with Westminster Hall in its erection, had a wooden roof of equal beauty. It is now used as a tobacco manufactory, but traces yet remain of its former grandeur, though two distinct floors were long ago raised within what was once the entire space between pavement and ceiling. In this hall, with its raised dais, the priors of St. Bartholomew feasted the royal and lordly frequenters of those great tournaments so frequently held in Smithfield during the middle ages, and immortalized in the pages of Froissart.

But a change was at hand, though for the present power and possession were to seem triumphant. Since those days, when the apostolic minstrel had founded his. Patmos in the "marsh dunge and fenny," power and luxury had debased the Church to an inconceivable extent. There were still within it "stern, pale-faced Churchmen, all chiselled out of the intellectual cast of temperament," but the majority, dead to real faith or service, sought only to add new blandishments to pompous rituals, to use power in many questionable shapes, and to give stringent proofs that their greatest industry now lay in the direction of rapacious acquisition. Their greed-one of the greatest proofs of degeneracy wherever it appears-is incredible. By the middle of the fourteenth century, nearly two-thirds of the entire area of London was covered by religious foundations, and nearly one-fifth of the whole population is supposed to have been associated with the religious communities.† So far from this state of things producing increased piety or learning, the great monastic schools had already begun to Verity on Civilisation, p. 75.

+ Allen's London, vol. ii. p. 13.

decline, and the parochial churches, stripped of all revenue, except what came to them in the form of oblations laid upon the altars, were only too numerously served by an ignorant class of priests. The people, on the other hand, had made progress in many directions, especially in such as related to their civil rights. Much could not yet be said for the intellectual development of the majority, for to this the priesthood had not looked; but better fed, better housed, beginning to feel the advantages of their jealously guarded rights, and of the acquisition of the property these rights secured, their resistance to the Church was not founded on doctrinal points, but on a determination to repress its greed and exactions, especially such as emanated from a foreign source. Thus their schism with the Church commenced on practical grounds of this kind. It was one eminently characteristic, and certain, not only to widen, but to lead to a more intellectual development of itself. In 1166, when a little band of Albigenses came over to this country from Germany, to disseminate their opinions with respect to the sacraments, baptism, and the institution of marriage, they met with no sympathy from the people; others appeared in the following century, but with a like result. These latter, according to Knighton, were "burned alive," for as early as the reign of John, the stake, as a punishment for religious delinquency, was not unknown in this country. But by the time Wycliffe commenced his controversial warfare with the Dominicans at Oxford, the case was widely different. The desire to repress exactions had assumed a new development, and the great plague which had so lately desolated half Europe, led, if not to the generation of new opinions, at least to that condition of the popular mind eminently calculated for their reception and promulgation. Thus Wycliffe met with adherents everywhere. His citation to appear in London was followed by extraordinary results; more than two-thirds of its inhabitants were converts to his opinions, and the translation and dispersion of copies of his Bible only increased and strengthened this new condition of the popular mind. As a proof of the eagerness with which the Scriptures in the new translation were sought, and the extent to which they were multiplied, no less than one hundred and fifty manuscripts, all written within the space of forty years from the time the translation was completed, were examined for the magnificent edition of Wycliffe's Bible, edited by the Rev. J. Forshall and Sir F. Madden of the British Museum, in 1850.

It must not be presumed that the clergy were either passive or unobservant spectators of these changes. Undoubtedly, at first they treated the reports of the growing "heresy" with that outward show of supercilious contempt, despotism generates; but the case was soon otherwise. Unable to effect what their animus willed in regard to Wycliffe personally, it was directed against his doctrines and his writings. These were "put down," both during and after his lifetime, with all the effective stringency in their power; and as soon as a new reign brought to their aid a

C

king willing to be their subservient tool for purposes of his own, this fear and bitter hate gave early evidence of what both were capable.

Hitherto the definition of, and the convictions for, heresy, had been confined to ecclesiastical courts and the canon law; for though what doctrines should be adjudged heresy was left by our old constitution to the determination of the ecclesiastical judge, the crown had a control over the spiritual power, and might pardon the convict by issuing no process against him-the writ de heretico comburendo, or the process of putting a convicted heretic to death by burning, being only issued by the special direction of the king in council. But a new time had arrived. Henry IV., son of John of Gaunt, the friend and disciple of Wycliffe, willing to secure his usurpation of the crown by the adherence of the clergy, transformed this old formula of the canon law into the common law of the country, and thus by an Act of Parliament, passed in January, 1401-seventeen years after the death of Wycliffe-sharpened the edge of persecution to its utmost keenness. By this statute, the diocesan alone, without the intervention of a synod, might convict of heretical tenets, and unless the convert abjured his opinions, or, if after abjuration he relapsed, the sheriff was bound, ex officio, if required by the bishop, to commit the unhappy victim to the flames, without waiting for the consent of the crown. Lollardy was also made a temporal offence, and indictable in the king's courts; which thereby gained, not an exclusive, but only a concurrent jurisdiction with the bishop's consistory.

It seems singular that this infamous statute should have passed without some opposition from the commons. None is on record; though so widely were Wycliffe's doctrines spread amongst the people, that only three years later, in 1404, the commons themselves, when called upon to grant supplies, proposed that the king should seize all the temporalities of the Church, and employ them as a perpetual fund for the service of the state. The inconsistency can only be accounted for on the grounds, that the decline of the king's popularity included the people's subserviency; or, that in the earlier parliaments of his reign, the favours granted to the mayor and citizens of London, and the repeal of obnoxious acts, had increased public gratitude at the price of its discretion. Be this as it may, the act soon bore fruit. It was passed in January, and in the March following William Sautre was made its first victim.

He was parish priest of a small church, then standing in Pancras Lane, Queen Street, Cheapside-its old burial-ground yet remains, though the church itself, destroyed in the great fire, was not again erected-and dedicated to St. Sith the Virgin. It was a rectory in the gift of the Prior and Convent of St. Mary's Overy, Southwark. Sautre was thus under, and perhaps purposely, the immediate observation of a powerful body of ecclesiastics, as previous to this he had been priest of St. Margaret's, at Lynn, in Norfolk, where, suspected of heretical opinions, he had been made to recant in the presence of the bishop of his diocese. This took place in

1399; and its reward was the small living already mentioned. The emoluments derived therefrom must have been trifling, for it was surrounded by a multitude of other churches, and as in all such cases, the profits from the glebe and tithes were in the hands of the patrons; but its vicinity to the dwellings of the rich spice and herb-sellers of Bucklersbury and the goldsmiths of Cheapside must have made the question of his doctrines one of importance in the view of those who bore in mind his recantation.

He seems, however, to have brought destruction on himself. Conscience-stricken, or aware of the infamy of preaching one class of doctrines, whilst another was secretly his, he petitioned parliament to be heard before it. But the clergy took the matter at once into their own hands. He was summoned before a council held in the Chapter House of St. Paul's; and here, in the presence of Anselm and six other bishops, he affirmed the eight opinions in which he had been previously examined, though denying that they were identified with those of his recantation. At least he sought to show a difference; but the council decided against him, and he was adjudged to be a relapsed heretic, and as such, sentenced to degradation; after that, to die, according to the new law. The chief question on which he was pressed, and one which in this case, as in so many others, was made the test of heresy, was, whether the Sacrament of the Altar, after the pronouncing of the sacramental words, remained material bread or not. He sought to evade it by declaring a firm belief that it was that bread of life that came down from heaven; this was not sufficient. He was required to acknowledge that it ceased to be bread, which, as a believer in Wycliffe's doctrines, he could not do.

After a lapse of four days, his degradation took place in St. Paul's Cathedral, in the presence of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, many bishops, and a vast multitude of spectators, as it had been resolved, in order to strike terror in all who held Wycliffe's doctrines, to perform this prelude to the stake with the precision usual to the Inquisitors of Languedoc.

What a new and extraordinary scene it must have been in that grand old cathedral of St. Paul's! The priests in their gorgeous vestments; the high as well as lateral altars, laden with their countless riches; the tombs, the lofty pillars, the arch upon arch receding into the dim distance of crypt, and cloister, and chapel; the light of the February morning streaming down upon all through the magnificent window of the nave.

And this the longest interlude to the saddest tragedy-must have taken time. There was to deprive this poor denier of a quibble of his books, his vestments, the church keys; there was to shave his head and put on it the cap of a lay person; and, lastly, there was to deliver him into the hands of the secular power,* * Wilkins, Concilia, iii. p. 252.