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