22 



precise period of the erection of this palace cannot be positively 

 determined; but it was probably ready for the King's reception in 

 1541, when he visited York, and resided, according to the records of 

 the Corporation, " within his Grace's palace at St. Mary's." When 

 Archbishop Holgate, the President of the Council of the North, visited 

 York in 1 545, it appears by the same records, that he was entertained 

 at the King's palace. It is probable that one of the rapacious 

 courtiers of the King, who had obtained a licence to convert to his 

 use the remains of the Abbey, laid his hands upon the newly-built 

 palace of the King and made spoil of this also, so that within ten or 

 twelve years of its erection, this splendid edifice became a mass of 

 ruins. 



May 4. — A paper, by the Rev. Charles Wellbeloved, was 

 read, respecting the supposed seal of St. Mary's Abbey, figured in 

 Hargrove's History of York (2,583), and in the fifth volume of the 

 Vetusta Monumenta, published by the Society of Antiquaries. 

 The matrix of the seal was presented in 1824 to the Yorkshire 

 Philosophical Society by Mr. Richd. Dalton, with an inscription de- 

 claring it to be the seal of St. Mary's Abbey; but by whom this 

 inscription was placed upon it is not known. He gave no account of 

 the place where or the time when it was found ; Mr. Hargrove speaks 

 of him as being the possessor of it in 1818. There is nothing in the 

 device or inscription to warrant the appropriation of it to any partic- 

 ular religious community or house, and in Poulson's Holderness (2,213) 

 a seal exactly similar is given as that of the Abbey of Melsa or 

 Meaux in Holderness. It is there said that the matrix of the seal 

 had been found about June 1834, by a labourer, in a stone coffin, 

 beneath a portion of the brick pavement of the floor of the Abbey of 

 Meaux, not previously disturbed, and sold to an itinerant vendor of 

 plaster images, on condition that a plaster cast, gilded and framed, 

 should be part of the bargain. From this cast the engraving in 

 Poulson's work had been made, but what had become of the original 

 had not been ascertained. Greenwood, the engraver, had obtained the 

 cast from the Rev. Mr. Dennis, of Beverley, who also communicated 

 to him the particulars respecting its discovery. No seal corresponding 

 with it has ever been found appended to any deed or document 

 proceeding from the Abbey of Meaux ; but there is in existence an 

 agreement between the Abbey and the Hospital of St. Leonard's, 

 York, touching a well at Wharrham-le-Street, which is quite different 

 from that said to have been discovered in the coffin. But it has as 



