n the monastery
of the glorious proto-martyr Alban himself. You have dilapidated the
common property; you have made away with the jewels; the copses, the
woods, the underwood, almost all the oaks, and other forest trees,
to the value of eight thousand marks and more, you have made to be
cut down without distinction, and they have by you been sold and
alienated. The brethren of the abbey, some of whom, as is reported,
are given over to all the evil things of the world, neglect the
service of God altogether. They live with harlots and mistresses
publicly and continuously, within the precincts of the monastery and
without. Some of them, who are covetous of honour and promotion, and
desirous therefore of pleasing your cupidity, have stolen and made
away with the chalices and other jewels of the church. They have
even sacrilegiously extracted the precious stones from the very
shrine of St. Alban; and you have not punished these men, but have
rather knowingly supported and maintained them. If any of your
brethren be living justly and religiously, if any be wise and
virtuous, these you straightway depress and hold in hatred.... You
...

But we need not transcribe further this overwhelming document. It
pursues its way through mire and filth to its most lame and impotent
conclusion. After all this, the abbot was not deposed; he was invited
merely to reconsider his doings, and, if possible, amend them. Such was
Church discipline, even under an extraordinary commission from Rome.
But the most incorrigible Anglican will scarcely question the truth of a
picture drawn by such a hand; and it must be added that this one
unexceptionable indictment lends at once assured credibility to the
reports which were presented fifty years later, on the general
visitation. There is no longer room for the presumptive objection that
charges so revolting could not be true. We see that in their worst form
they could be true, and the evidence of Legh and Leghton, of Rice and
Bedyll, as it remains in their letters to Cromwell, must be shaken in
detail, or else it must be accepted as correct. We cannot dream that
Archbishop Morton was mistaken, or was misled by false information. St.
Albans was no obscure priory in a remote and thinly-peopled county. The
Abbot of St. Albans was a peer of the realm, taking precedence of
bishops, living in the full glare of notoriety, within a few miles