1915] on The Archives of Westminster Abbey 455 



liis coronation as Henry lY. in Richard's stead, the Abbot bids his 

 friends — 



Come home with me to supper ; and I'll lay 



A plot shall show us all a merry day. * 



In the next act he is reported dead : 



The grand conspirator, Abbot of Westminster, 

 With clog of conscience and sour melancholy 

 Hath yielded up his body to the grave ; f 



enough in point of fact he survived the event by twenty years. 

 "What I want you to notice is that Shakespeare's authorities do not 

 give my Abbot a name, and that he has no article to his credit in 

 the Dictionary of National Biographij, I do not propose to unravel 

 his conspiracies, if he was guilty of them, though it will appear from 

 what follows that he was trusted by Henry IV. who ousted Richard, 

 and by Henry V. who enthroned poor Richard in his grateful 

 memory. My business is with our Abbey archives and what they 

 say about, an obscure individual. 



Let me take you, then, up a turret staircase through a door in 

 the East Cloister into 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 were already long established, and they must not minish 

 aught from them. Therefore, whereas the North Transept has aisles 

 on its east side and its west, the South Transept is aisled only on the 

 east. So the roof of the cloister upholds the floor of the apartment 

 which we enter. We look out into the Abbey eastward through 

 three of Henry III.'s bays across a low wall split up by his dwarf 

 pillars. There are signs of royalty in the room, crowned heads at 

 the capitals of the colonnade pillars ; and on a 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 for marking what stones and what 

 buildings are here, and for witnessing the entry and the circuit of 

 some procession of State as it arrived at Poets' Corner door from the 

 Palace, would naturally be appropriated as a royal pew. Be that 

 as it may, it Avas devoted in very early times to the purposes of a 

 muniment room ; it contains a cupboard which may well have been 

 set up under King Richard's hart in King Richard's reign, and at 

 least one of its archive chests belongs to the fourteenth century. 

 Here, then, from that century onwards, the great Convent gathered 

 and arranged its papers. For the last twenty years the Dean and 

 Chapter have endeavoured to atone for previous indifference to the 

 value of their treasures by entrusting to Dr. Edward Scott, formerly 

 of the British Museum, the task of describing the documents and 

 compiHng an index. I will not tell you how many hours he has 



* Act IV., sc. 1, 1. 332-3. t Act V., sc. 6, 1. 19-21. 



