ir capture of
the city. In the old annalist's account we read (in Latin) how they
"entered the church of St. Andrew on the day on which the Lord hung on
the cross for sinners.... Armed knights on their horses, coursing around
the altars, dragged away with impious hands some who fled for refuge
thither, the gold and silver and other precious things being with
violence carried off thence. Many royal charters, too, and other
muniments, in the Prior's Chapel, and necessary to the church of
Rochester, were destroyed and torn up. The oratories, cloisters, chapter
house, infirmary and all the sacred buildings were turned into horses'
stables, and everywhere filled with the dung of animals and the
defilement of dead bodies."

There is a record of a later, more welcome visit from Earl Simon's
conqueror. In 1300 Edward I. made a progress in Kent, and we find the
following items in the wardrobe accounts for this, the twenty-eighth
year of his reign. On the 18th of February he offered seven shillings
at the shrine of St. William, and a like amount again on the next day.
He then went forward to Canterbury, and on his return from the
archiepiscopal city gave, on the 27th of the same month, seven shillings
each for the shrines of SS. Paulinus and Ythamar in the church of the
Priory.

From March till October, 1314, we read that Isabel, the queen of
Robert Bruce, was a prisoner in Rochester Castle, permitted to walk at
convenient times, under safe custody, within its precincts and those of
the Priory of St. Andrew adjoining. This is, however, to some extent a
matter of controversy.

The fourteenth century saw the junction of the new and the Norman work
in the nave completed, and the design of rebuilding the whole western
arm finally abandoned. A beautiful capital at the joining on the south
side will call for especial mention later, and in the part of the
triforium just over it there is a piece of apparently later-Norman work,
which is, however, by builders of the "Decorated" period. They seem to
have found it best to reproduce here, as accurately as possible, what
they had just destroyed. That it is by them is shown by the stone used,
which is greensand and not the Caen stone of later-Norman workmen, and
by differences in working. The early-Norman architects had chiefly used
tufa, and these successive changes of material are of great help in
assigning their respective dates to various parts of the fabric.

About 1320 some alterati