s 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 of London. The archbishop had
ample means of ascertaining the truth; and, we may be
sure, had taken care to examine his ground before he
left on record so tremendous an accusation. This story
is true--as true as it is piteous. We will pause a
moment over it before we pass from this, once more to
ask our passionate Church friends whether still they will
persist that the abbeys were no worse under the Tudors
than they had been in their origin, under the Saxons,
or under the first Norman and Plantagenet kings. No,
indeed, it was not so. The abbeys which towered in
the midst of the English towns, the houses