WILLIAM DE COLCHESTER
ABBOT OF WESTMINSTER

BY
E. H. PEARCE
CANON OF WESTMINSTER

SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE
LONDON: Northumberland Avenue, W.C.
New York: E. S. GORHAM
1915

TO
J. D. AND H. R. D.
WITH AFFECTION

CONTENTS

NOTE

Having had the honour of an invitation to deliver in May last a "Friday Evening Discourse" at the Royal Institution on the Archives of Westminster Abbey, I thought it best to confine what I could say within an hour to the career of a single man, preferably one whose record had not hitherto been written. I have here expanded the lecture to some extent, and have added references. I am indebted to Mr. David Weller, the Dean's Virger, for some excellent pictures.

E. H. P.

3, Little Cloisters,
September, 1915.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

WILLIAM DE COLCHESTER

I

A WINDOW IN THE NAVE

When the body of the late Lord Kelvin was laid to rest, by a right which there was none to dispute, in the Abbey Church of Westminster, it was placed, by the same kind of right, close to the grave of Sir Isaac Newton. In the same corner there are the graves, or the memorials, of Darwin and Herschel, of Joule and Gabriel Stokes and John Couch Adams, to be joined shortly by tablets in memory of Alfred Russel Wallace, of Sir Joseph Hooker, and of another Joseph, who died Lord Lister. It was not likely that Kelvin would long lack some memorial more impressive than the slab which covers his remains, and it was a happy and appropriate impulse which caused the representatives of engineering science on both sides of the Atlantic to undertake the task of providing one. But what form could it best take? The walls of the church have been overcrowded, to the grievous destruction of some precious features. The floor-space, as the centuries following the Reformation were apt to forget, is intended to serve the purposes of public worship. But the large windows of the Nave offer to those who would honour and foster the memory of the great dead a means of fulfilling their desire, and of adorning the fabric at the same time. In this case the chance was welcomed, and Kelvin has his Abbey memorial in stained glass. The window is one of a series projected in 1907 by Dr. Armitage Robinson, now Dean of Wells, and loyally accepted by his successor in the Deanery of Westminster—a series in which there are placed side by side a King of England who contributed either to the greatness of the foundation or to the majesty of the building, and the Abbot through whom the King worked his pious will. The King in this case is Harry of Monmouth, and we are thinking with somewhat mingled feelings that October 25, 1915, brings us to the 500th anniversary of the battle of Agincourt. But it is Henry V.'s Abbot who concerns us now; for in such a scheme of windows the Abbots are more difficult to justify to the ordinary visitor than the monarchs, not because of unworthiness, but because there has been but little effort made to appraise their worth as heads of our ancient house, or as conspicuous figures in their generation. 1

In this case the Abbot is William of Colchester. As we shall see, his character is depicted by Shakespeare, but he has no article to his credit in the Dictionary of National Biography. If he is to be brought back from obscurity, it can only be accomplished by repeated visits to the Abbey Muniment Room. I shall therefore ask the reader to climb with me the turret staircase which is approached from a door in the East Cloister, and to enter a noble apartment of which that cloister is the origin. For when Henry III.'s builders came to the planning of the South Transept, known as Poets' Corner, the lines of the Great Cloister had already been long established, and must not be minished or altered by the new work. Therefore, whereas the North Transept has aisles on its east side and on its west, the South Transept is aisled only on the east side. The East Cloister occupies the space of what would otherwise be the western aisle, and thus upholds the floor of the apartment which we enter. We look into the distant recesses of the Abbey eastward, through three of Henry III.'s bays, across a low wall split up by the bases of dwarf pillars. There are signs of royalty in the room, such as the crowned heads at the capitals of the pillars of the colonnade by which we enter, and on the wooden wall which shuts off the southern section is the outline of a white hart crowned, the emblem of Richard II. Professor Lethaby has suggested to me that such a point of vantage from which to see what stones and what buildings are here, and from which to observe some procession of State as it arrives from the Palace by Poets' Corner door and makes its solemn circuit of the church, would naturally be appropriated as a royal pew. Be that as it may, the room was set apart in very early times for the storing of muniments; it contains a cupboard which probably dates from Richard II.'s reign and now stands under Richard II.'s hart; and at least one of its archive chests, if not more, belongs to the fourteenth century. We may assume, then, that here, from that century onwards, the Convent kept its official archives—charters, leases, acquittances, and the annual account-rolls of its officers. Here, for the last twenty years, the Dean and Chapter have had the constant service of Dr. Edward Scott, formerly of the British Museum, as the Keeper of their muniments. He has written with his own hand over 110,000 descriptions of documents, and has compiled, and is still steadily compiling, an index of persons and things. I am merely attempting to construct a life of Abbot Colchester out of documents which I have spelt out with Dr. Scott's assistance. Any one who finds the story uninteresting must console himself with the thought that it has not been told before.

II

A NOVICE FROM ESSEX

In Shakespeare's Tragedy of King Richard II., there is an Abbot of Westminster who flits craftily across the scene, generally shadowing a Bishop of Carlisle, whom we shall meet again. When Bolingbroke announces that he is about to be crowned King in Richard's stead, this Abbot bids his friends—

In the next act 3 it is stated that he is dead—

As to which it must be sufficient to say that the poet who could not give the Abbot's name was equally unconscious of the fact that he outlived his alleged conspiracy by twenty years.

But his name was William Colchester, and we may begin by assuming that, as his name implies, he was a Colchester man. In and before his time, and for a considerable space afterwards, the customary designation of a Brother was his Christian name and a place name, with or without the copula de; in earlier years he called himself William de Colchester, but the documents which concern him as Abbot mostly speak of William Colchester, or William Abbot of Westminster. Nor are we left to guess-work as to the place of his origin. In later life, according to the habit of his time, he busied himself with the endowment of obits, or anniversaries, for the good of his soul. Here is a document, 4 dated May 20, 1406, in which he bargained with the Prior of St. Botolph, Colchester, having paid 40s. to Henry IV.'s Clerk of the Hanaper to seal the bargain, that one of the canon-chaplains of that Priory should say Mass every week, at sixpence a week, for his soul and for the souls of his parents; that the Prior and his Brethren should observe his anniversary, again with a memorial of his parents, in the parish church of St. Nicholas, Colchester; that a set sum should be distributed yearly to the vicar of St. Nicholas, to the poor of the parish, and to the prisoners in Colchester Castle; and that the tomb of his parents in the parish churchyard should be kept in proper repair.

We may conclude, then, that this was his native parish, and that in his great position as Abbot of Westminster he wished the connexion to be had in remembrance. But he knew to a mile the distance between his Abbey and Colchester, and how easy it might be for the Prior of St. Botolph to accept his bequest and to neglect to fulfil its conditions. So in 1407 (December 3), when he was completing the arrangements 5 for maintaining an anniversary at the Abbey out of the revenues of the church of Aldenham, 6 in Hertfordshire, he inserted an instruction that the Monk-Bailiff of Westminster, at the time of his annual visit to the Essex manors, should either proceed or send to Colchester and make careful inquiry as to the due observance of the covenants, as who should say, "It is as well not to trust these provincial Priors further than you can see them."

We get to know also from the grant 7 of another anniversary at the Abbey's daughter Priory of Hurley, in Berkshire, that his father's name was Reginald, and his mother's Alice. He had a sister who in 1389-90 was living in Cambridge, for in that year his Receiver entered a gift of 12d. to a man who came from my lord's sister at that town; and we shall find that he had other connexions, some poor enough to bring him a basket of poultry, some rich enough to receive from him a present of jewelry. Evidently he sprang from a burgher stock of no great eminence, for whom the Church seemed the sphere in which the career was opened to the talents.

How he came to enter our Monastery we shall never know, for with all the wealth of our materials there survives not a trace of his or of any other postulant's testimonials. He came, he was seen, he was admitted. We know what the requisites were—that he must have examined his conscience as to the motives which led him to apply, that he must be sound in body, free in civil status, unburdened by debt or other obligations, and as a rule not less than eighteen years of age. 8 What steps the Fathers of the Convent took to secure outside evidence of a candidate's fitness in these respects must be left to the imagination. He passed muster and joined their number.

Our first trace of William Colchester's name on the books of the House is in connexion with his ordination as priest. I cannot tell what Bishop admitted him to the ministry, nor where it took place, but it can be ascertained that he said Mass for the first time during 1361-2 (the conventual year was reckoned for administrative purposes, as it is still, from Michaelmas to Michaelmas), and we are able to discover this, not because it was felt to be an event worth chronicling for its own sake, but because in that year three of the officers note that they severally expended 1s. 7½d. in bread and wine as "exennia"—i.e. a complimentary gift 9—made to him in honour of the event. We may suppose that he was then twenty-three years of age; he may have entered the Convent in or about 1356; and we may take 1338 as the probable year of his birth. If, as we have assumed, he entered the Convent some years before his ordination, then he did so during the reign of Simon Langham, the most eminent of all our Abbots, but it is not possible to say whether he received priest's orders before or after the election of Nicholas Litlington to the Abbacy in April, 1362. The Monastery was still suffering in numbers from the ravages of the Great Pestilence in 1349, and consisted in 1356-7 of only thirty-five monks and two novices. Colchester was the last of five new members of whom we hear first in 1361-2.

Five years later, in 1366-7, he was chosen by the Convent as one of two of their number whom they thought specially apt to learning, and whom it was therefore their duty to send up to Oxford to join the other Benedictine students at Gloucester Hall, an institution established by the Order in its General Chapter held at Abingdon in 1290. 10 Our custom was that the Convent Treasurer paid £10 yearly to each Westminster student for his maintenance, 11 besides the cost of his journeys to and fro; so that it is possible to compile from the Treasurers' rolls a fairly complete list of our Oxford scholars from 1356, when I came upon the first signs of a definite system, until the Dissolution. The plan tended to the great advantage of the monasteries; it meant that the likely young men were taken at an impressionable time in their lives out of the narrow rut of cloistral life, and were associated with the world of scholarship and of affairs; and it will be found that a large proportion of those who were sent to Oxford rose quickly to positions of trust in the Convent. William Colchester remained at Oxford, save for periodical visits to the Abbey, from 1366 to 1370. It cannot be said that the Latin prose of which he was capable does credit to his University, and even monkish Latinity was seldom worse than that in which his few surviving letters are couched. But it is fair to assume that he learnt how to deal with men, and we can now go on to see that the Convent which had supported him at Oxford was satisfied with the product of its expenditure.

III

A MAN OF AFFAIRS

Soon after his return from the University two things happened, as if to signify that his competence was recognized. In October, 1371, he was promoted, as the Westminster phrase went, to sit by the bell—sedere ad skillam; that is to say, he moved up to the seniors' table in the Refectory, where was the bell or skyllet which gave the signal for grace to be said, or for the reader of the week to begin the lection. Like the day of his first Mass, this promotion, coming as a rule not less than ten years later, was reckoned to be an occasion for a little addition to the usually frugal fare, and we can state the date of it because the Sacrist and the Infirmarer and the Treasurer each sent him bread and wine to the value of 2s. 3½d., so that he might make merry with his friends.

Secondly, he begins to be recognized as an experienced person who can safely be sent upon missions involving prudence and the management of men. In the same year, 1371-2, a payment of twenty shillings was made by the Steward of the Abbot's Household for the expenses of William Colchester and two valets who were sent to Northampton for the meeting of the General Chapter of the English Benedictines, probably in attendance on the Abbot of Westminster, who was frequently one of the Presidents of the Chapter.

But the next year, 1372-3, as we learn from the Sacrist, saw Colchester entrusted with a still more delicate duty. It was on this wise. Among the precious relics given to the Abbey by Edward the Confessor 12 was the girdle of the Virgin Mary—zona beate Marie—which she had made with her own hands and had herself worn. 13 It was regarded as having especial value in securing a safe delivery to expectant mothers, and when the Westminster Book of Customs was compiled by Abbot Richard de Ware about a century before Colchester's admission, it was the rule that the Sacrist or, as he was sometimes called, the Secretary, should carry the girdle of the blessed Mother of God to any destination which it was appointed to reach, or should be at charges with the bearer of it in his place. 14 So here is our Sacrist paying the expenses of William Colchester, namely, 13s. 4d., and the more considerable price of two horses for the journey, £6 16s. 8d. But the Sacrist has something to enter on the other side, an offering of £2 from the Countess of March, the lady who craved the aid of the girdle. If any one is churlish enough to say that the bargain seems but a poor one for the Convent—150s. spent on the journey, and only 40s. received from the beneficiary—the answer is that the horses would be sold at the end of the return journey for almost as much as they cost. If, again, it is objected that in any case the lady's gift was money thrown away, it is not so easy to convince the gainsayer. For while it is on record that on February 12, 1371 (i.e. in the year previous to that of the Sacrist's account), the lady Philippa, granddaughter of Edward III., did present her husband, the 3rd Earl of March, with a daughter who in process of time became the wife of Harry Hotspur, yet it does not appear that she was equally blessed during the year 1372-3.

Such duties sensibly performed, William Colchester was not long in attaining to administrative office. To begin with, Abbot Litlington chose him as his Custos Hospicii; i.e. Seneschal or steward of his household. We have the roll on which the young monk gave an account of his stewardship for the year Michaelmas to Michaelmas, 1373-4, and as the doings it records represent his early experience of that conventual business in which he was to be immersed for nearly half a century, we may stay by it for a short space in order to get our impressions.

He found his master in possession of a considerable rent-roll in various parts of the country, the manors being situate in the counties of Worcester, Gloucester, Oxford, Surrey, Buckingham, and Middlesex. The rentals amounted to £696 13s. 6d., and the sale of stock, including an ox sold for 18s. 4d., and a cow—timore pestilencie—for 13s., brought the total to £719 8s. 8d. Large as this sum sounds, especially when multiplied to correspond with present values, it was none too large for the needs of the position. Household expenses, which are not entered in detail, came to £151 1s. 4½d. The purchase of live-stock—grey palfreys, bullocks, cows, steers, sheep, pigs, swans, poultry, and no less than 966 pigeons at about ½d. each—required £63 2s. 10d., and the outlay on dead stock such as bacon, salt-fish, five barrels of white herring, fourteen casks of red herring, and three casks of Scottish red herring, amounted to £31 8s. 4d. Lest it should be claimed that the Scottish variety was a special delicacy, we must add that the latter cost only 4s. a barrel as against 5s. 6d. for the other. Nor, if the quantities seem large, must it be lightly concluded that there was carelessness in the dispensation; indeed, it was the Seneschal's duty to enter on the back of his roll a stock-keeping account, from which it may be gleaned that all the herrings were consumed and eighty pigs; but there was a residue of five salt-fish and of two out of sixteen bullocks. Altogether in corn and wine and clothing and gifts to visitors and in other ways there was an expenditure of £684 to set against a revenue of £719.

But what we want is an idea of the duties and experiences that came to the young Seneschal, and this can be obtained from various items. He gets a pair of my lord's boots mended for twopence, and small sums go in stringing the great sportman's bows or in buying bags in which to carry his arrow-heads. That which cost more, and was probably more interesting to Colchester himself, was the coming and going of personages or their servants—the squire of the Earl of Cambridge (Edmund Langley, fifth son of Edward III.), who receives 20s. for bringing a letter to the Abbot from his lord; the Earl of Warwick's steward, who comes to sell a black palfrey; a monk of his own year, Richard Excestr', who is just starting on his career at Oxford, and to whom the Abbot gives a fatherly present of 20s.; the Bishop of Durham's 15 man, whose master we know as the builder of Bishop Hatfield Hall, and who is sent with a gift of two greyhounds to the Abbot. Several messengers arrive from the Prince, i.e. the Black Prince, who is now at Wycombe and now at Kensington, and Abbot Litlington makes several journeys by boat to call on the Bishop of Winchester, no less a personage than William of Wykeham, who was in some disgrace at the time.

Having in this way served the Abbot efficiently, Colchester received his next responsibility from the whole Chapter, who chose him as Convent Treasurer, and "Coquinarius" or Kitchener, for the year 1375-6. Happily we still possess his compotus as such. I must not describe it at length, but one feature of it, an entry under the head of "pitancie et flacones," is of too great interest to be passed by. Pittances were additional meals on special occasions by way of varying the dreary round of dry bread and sour wine, which alone could be provided in the Refectory. But "flacones" seem to be pancakes, and pancakes are a recognized Westminster institution, though it is no longer the duty of the Convent Treasurer to provide them for his brethren. I first translate the item as Colchester entered it:

"Paid in milk, 'creym,' butter, cheese and eggs bought for the pancakes in Easter week, on Rogation days and at Pentecost, 64s. 8d."

And now for some further light upon it. In 1389, when Colchester had occupied the Abbot's chair for three years, the Kitchener was Brother William Clehungre or Clayhanger, who has left us his bill 16 for materials, and from this it will appear how the pancake-custom has developed in the interval. It sets forth his

"expenses laid out in respect of the pancakes prescribed for the brethren and delivered to the monastery according to custom during 56 days each year, namely from Easter Day to Trinity Sunday, in the 12th year of the reign of King Richard II., as appears by all the parcels:—

Our Kitchener makes some trifling assumptions in his multiplication as to the butter and the eggs, and he robs the Convent of fivepence when he adds up the total. The number of eggs sounds large, but it means only 103 and a fraction daily, and when it is considered that in 1389 the Prior and his Brethren numbered forty-nine persons, this works out at the by no means excessive rate of 2½ eggs daily to each brother.

But there is a local reason for dwelling on this custom. Westminster School is admittedly a Tudor foundation, but at the Abbey we cherish the conviction that its roots penetrate deep down into the monastic soil. Every Shrove Tuesday the school—in modern times by means of selected gladiators—makes a furious onset upon a single pancake. Mr. Sergeaunt 17 speaks of the ceremony as "the sole survivor of the medieval sports," and adds that "although its origin cannot be traced, it can hardly have come into being after the date of Elizabeth's foundation." Is it, then, beyond all likelihood that it arose out of some ancient protest of our Benedictines against the prospect of being fed upon pancakes every day for eight weeks? Is it inconceivable that the successful protestant was conducted at the end of the "greese," as now, to the Lord Abbot's presence to receive one mark from his lordship's bounty? All we can say is that the Brethren continued to be similarly regaled from Easter to Trinity until the Dissolution of the House.

IV

A PROCTOR AT ROME

William Colchester ceased to be Treasurer in the autumn of 1376, and within eight months circumstances had arisen in which his capacities were to be put to a severer and more prolonged test. We are all familiar with the expression "St. Stephen's," as applied to Parliament House. But it is not as readily realized that the House of Commons, after sitting for long years in the Chapter House 18 at the Abbey, removed itself at the Dissolution to the ancient Chapel of St. Stephen in the Palace of Westminster. I am only concerned now with the story of that chapel 19 as it is related to William Colchester's career. Placed where it was, it stood within the ancient limits of our Abbot's jurisdiction, but its Dean and his twelve Prebendaries had good grounds for regarding themselves as a royal foundation, and they craved the kind of ecclesiastical independence which attaches to-day to St. George's Chapel in Windsor Castle. Our Convent resisted this claim, which, on the other hand, had the good will of the Court. In 1377 a suit to test the rights of the case was entered before the Roman Curia, and it was necessary to appoint some careful and astute person to take charge in Rome of the Abbey's interests, and to negotiate their success. I will not go further into the merits of the case. It lasted for seventeen years, and was ultimately settled, on the whole, in the Abbey's favour, the College of St. Stephen agreeing to pay to the Abbey a yearly sum of five marks, and the right of the Abbot to instal the Dean of St. Stephen's being upheld. 20 What concerns us is that the Abbot and Convent chose William Colchester as their proctor at Rome in this suit, and that by good fortune there survive long statements of his personal and legal costs in carrying out the task laid upon him. They will serve as a guide-book of his journey and will give us considerable insight into his adventures. 21

He left Westminster on June 22 10, 1377, and was absent, as he is careful to record, for two years, twenty-three weeks, and three days. His first business was to furnish himself with official commendations, and to this end he sought for royal letters—pro expedicione cause—from the Keeper of the Privy Seal; he paid 3s. 4d. to the Keeper's servant to urge his master to dictate them, and by a like payment he made things right with the scrivener who would execute them; but the letters were not ready when he started. Meantime we can watch him as he reckons up the difficulties of his ordeal. It was arranged that he should go by way of Avignon, for Master Thomas Southam, 23 Archdeacon of Oxford, was still there, settling the affairs of Cardinal Langham's will. But the Pope was no longer there. Gregory XI. had quitted that scene of luxurious exile and ravenous extortion on September 13, 1376, and had entered Rome on January 17, 1377. 24 Most Englishmen had resented the Avignonese sojourn because it threw the Papacy into the hands of the French, but William Colchester, as he packed his valise, saw the matter in a different light. Because the Pope had left, there was no great chance of finding company for the journey; 25 and company meant so much the more security. There was nothing for it but to hire a companion, and he found one Gerard of London, who was willing to face the journey for 20s. and his expenses. Colchester is conscious that this seems an extravagance, but he enters in his account a plea that it was justified by the variety of language and the dangers of the roads in foreign parts. 26 For the road to Dover he bought for himself a horse and saddle which cost 34s. 8d.; but it appears that he rather expected the man Gerard to walk, for he extenuates a further payment of 26s. 8d. for a horse, a saddle, and bridle for Gerard, by stating that the man entirely declined to go afoot. Thus mounted, they reached Dover, where they wasted five days in waiting for a passage, and all the time the cost of food was mounting up at the rate of sixpence a day for each horse, and fivepence a meal for each man. The passage, when they obtained one, cost 3s. 4d. each for the men, and double for the horses. At that cost they reached Calais, and within three days were at Bruges, where again there was a long halt. For the royal letters had not come. Edward III. was on his death-bed, and passed away eleven days after our travellers left London. But Colchester is convinced that an enemy had done this, and when he insists that the issue of the letters has been frustrated "per aduersarios," we must remember that the Dean and College of St. Stephen's were closer to the royal ear than our Abbot and Convent. Whatever the cause, the result was the entry in his account of the cost of nine days' commissariat at Bruges, together with a reward of 10d. to the hotel servants, which he at once resents and excuses as being the custom of the country. 27 In brief, he had already spent nearly all the £10 which he received at his journey's start from the hands of Brother John Lakyngheth, his rival for monastic promotion.

So now he converts his balance of 16s. 8d. from sterling into florins, reckoning a florin at 3s. 2d. To this he adds seven florins by the sale of his own horse—a creditable bargain, for, having paid 34s. 8d. for the beast in London, he has ridden it to Bruges, and there parted with it for 22s. 2d. On the other hand, Gerard's horse has turned out badly; the journey has nearly killed it; 28 and it goes for three florins, or 9s. 6d. Colchester negotiated a loan of twenty-three florins, and on they went towards the south, sometimes hiring mounts, sometimes begging a ride in a cart, often in terror of the Frenchmen, who laid an ambush for them as they entered Dauphiné, so that our travellers hired a guide and went through byways. On the 27th day after leaving Bruges they entered Avignon, and next day they found Master Southam at his lodgings by the church of Our Lady of Miracles.

For a moment I lay aside Colchester's ledger and turn to a separate document; for Southam had with him at Avignon another Westminster monk, John Farnago, who became Colchester's paymaster and in due course presented to the Abbey an account 29 of what he had laid out on his behalf. We are thus furnished with the date of the arrival of Colchester and Gerard—July 24—and learn that they required bed and board at Avignon till August 19. Farnago purchased for his Brother a fresh outfit—cape, tunic, and hood of black Benedictine cloth, a scapular and cowl, and a plain colobium (or sleeveless tunic), buying the last, as he says, from Hagyuus, a Jew, whose real name was probably Hayyim. He also provided a horse for the journey to Marseilles, where Colchester was to take ship, and put some money in his scrip. So our Proctor turned his back on Avignon, perhaps not fully realizing that when on August 14, five days before his departure, he and Farnago witnessed the probate of Cardinal Langham's will, 30 he had been concerned with a document which was to have a vast effect on the church and the conventual buildings of St. Peter, Westminster.

We turn back to Colchester's own ledger, and note that he does not enter the actual date of his arrival in Rome; but we can fix it fairly closely. He says that, having got thus far, he was obliged to move on to Anagni, some forty miles southward from Rome on the road to Naples; and we know that Gregory XI., who had spent the summer of 1377 there, returned to Rome on November 17. 31 Colchester must have found the Papal Court busy at the packing of its trunks and must have returned with it forthwith to Rome; for the first date that he mentions is November 20. It would be wearisome to pursue the details of his activity in engaging counsel, English and Italian, and in paying their fees; but it is worth while to notice that there has been no great change since his day in legal expressions—retinuit duos aduocatos—and perhaps not a complete reform of illegal practice; for instance, he explains that he gave six florins to the valet—cubicularius—of the Cardinal of Milan, who was concerned in the decision of the case, with a view to the man's stirring up his master to sign a certain document; the object of the gift, says Colchester, was greater security, because at the moment there was a fierce altercation between the parties to the suit.

His expenses, already large, received a sudden addition through the death, on March 27, 1378, of Gregory XI. Seldom can an observant traveller have had a more exciting experience than to be in Rome during the session of the Consistory 32 which set Bartolommeo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari, upon what Colchester calls "the apex of the chief Apostolate." On personal grounds our monk must have been pleased at the choice of the electors, for the new Pope was the special protégé of the French Cardinal of Pampeluna, Simon Langham's friend and executor. But financially the effect was provoking. We know that Urban VI. proved himself a man "full of Neapolitan fire and savagery," who thought "that the Cardinals could be reduced to absolute obedience by mere rudeness," 33 and we are quite prepared for Colchester's statement that between the Pope and the Sacred College there arose a great dissension. Cardinals and curials fled secretly, he says, in some numbers, and among the latter the two advocates whom he had briefed and paid. That money at any rate was a dead loss, but there was this advantage in Urban's case, that, knowing the preference of the Cardinals for Anagni as a summer residence, he decided for Tivoli in their despite, and Colchester could get there in a few hours for a couple of florins. Six weeks had to be spent within sound of Horace's waterfall before his business was finished. His return journey led him through Nice, where he was robbed of his cloak and other property. Then to Avignon once more, and thence in due course—at least, so he hoped—to the Abbey.

But he was fated, nevertheless, to turn again and revisit the Roman Court; for while he tarried in Master Southam's lodgings at Avignon, in September, 1378, there came news of a notable murder committed in the church of Westminster while the Gospel was being read at High Mass, 34 on August, 11. The victim was one Robert Hawle, who had escaped from the Tower and had taken sanctuary at Westminster. The incident had its political aspects; it raised various perilous questions; and Southam advised that Colchester should return to Rome in order to counteract any plots that might be mooted in behalf of the authors of "that horrible deed." So again the expenses began to roll up—the journey overland to Marseilles; a passage by galley to Ostia; a sojourn in Rome for the greater part of December, 1378; gratuities on several occasions to the Papal janitors for free entrance to the Chamber and the Consistory, and to the valets for access to the Pope himself; an expensive struggle by each faction to extract from the Curia the kind of Bull that each side wanted, in which our Proctor was apparently successful; and a journey from Rome to Bruges lasting forty-one days. Colchester waited for three weeks at Sluis to secure a passage across the Channel, in the belief that the enemy was watching Calais with the intention of doing him violence; 35 and when he reached his native shore, he rode up to London by ways that were devious for the same reason, arriving there in November, 1379. It was neither easy nor without peril to be the chosen representative of Westminster at the Roman Court.