Appendix:
See Note 88, p. 60.
The account of William Wallingford’s abbacy in the Lives and Benefactions113 ... is inconsistent with all that is known of him from other sources. The Abbot is described in a tone of excessive admiration which cannot be reconciled with the account of him supplied by Morton’s letter. In the Lives and Benefactions ..., for instance, he is stated to have left the Monastery entirely free of debt. This is not only intrinsically improbable, but is directly contradicted by Morton’s statement. Again, it is difficult to imagine any adequate reason why the convent should solemnly fix its seal as a testimony to the proof of the narrative, especially when the Abbot was, as it seems, still living. Indeed, considered apart from other evidence, this last passage, without explicitly stating it, distinctly implies that Wallingford did die in 1484. Doubtless the error of Newcome (followed by the editors of Dugdale’s Monasticon), who states that Wallingford died in 1484, is to be explained in this way.
It may be well, therefore, to repeat that the folio of the Register containing the account of Wallingford’s election is missing, having been apparently torn from the MS.; that he had been convicted of appropriating Abbot Stoke’s treasure in 1451; that in the ‘Register of John Whethamstede’ he is continually mentioned in terms of extreme disgust; and finally, that the Register of his own abbacy breaks off abruptly the year before Morton’s Commission.
In view of these facts we must regard the story of his abbacy, as told in the Lives and Benefactions, with extreme mistrust. It is not improbable that this account was written by a convent fearful of offending a tyrannical Abbot; it is by no means impossible that the Abbot himself caused the narrative to be written as an answer to the charges contained in Morton’s letter.