small aumbrys, or recesses. A most interesting
panel-portrait of Queen Elizabeth was found in one of them, which
was exhibited at the Tudor Exhibition. In 1896, when the house
of John Wesley at Lewisham was pulled down, who should be found
between the walls but the amorous Merry Monarch and a court beauty!
The former is said to be Riley's work. Secretary Thurloe's MSS.,
as is well known, were found embedded in a ceiling of his lodgings
at Lincoln's Inn. In pulling down a block of old buildings in
Newton Street, Holborn, a hidden space was found in one of the
chimneys, and there, covered with the dust of a century, lay
a silver watch, a silk guard attached, and seals bearing the
Lovat crest. The relic was promptly claimed by Mr. John Fraser,
the claimant to the long-disputed peerage.[1]

[Footnote 1: December 14th, 1895.]

Small hiding-places have been found at the manor house of Chew
Magna, Somerset, and Milton Priory, a Tudor mansion in Berkshire.
In the latter a green shagreen case was found containing a
seventeenth-century silver and ivory pocket knife and fork. A
small hiding-place at Coughton Court, Warwickshire, brought to
light a bundle of priest's clothes, hidden there in the days
of religious persecution. In 1876 a small chamber was found at
Sanderstead Court, Surrey, containing a small blue-and-white jar
of Charles I.'s time. Three or four small secret repositories
existed behind some elaborately carved oak panels in the great
hall of the now ruinous Harden Hall, near Stockport. In similar
recesses at Gawdy Hall, Suffolk, were discovered two ancient
apostle spoons, a watch, and some Jacobean MSS. A pair of gloves
and some jewels of seventeenth-century date were brought to light
not many years ago in a secret recess at Woodham Mortimer Manor
House, Essex. A very curious example of a hiding-place for valuables
formerly existed at an old building known as Terpersie Castle,
near Alford, Lincolnshire. The sides of it were lined with stone
to preserve articles from damp, and it could be drawn out of
the wall like a drawer.

In the year 1861 a hidden receptacle was found at the Elizabethan
college of Wedmore, Kent, containing Roman Catholic MSS. and
books; and at Bromley Palace, close by, in a small aperture below
the floor, was found the leathern sole of a pointed shoe of the
Middle Ages! Small hiding-places of this nature existed in a
wing, now pulled down, of the Abbey House, Whitby (in "Lady Anne's
Room").