464 The Rev. E. H. Pearce [May 14, 



if he had to cut his losses and fee others, there was this advantage 

 with Urban YI., that, knowing the preference of the Cardinals for 

 Anagni as a summer residence, he decided through sheer perverse- 

 ness for Tivoli, and Colchester could get there in two days for a 

 couple of florins. After spending six weeks within sound of 

 Horace's waterfall, he turned homeward to Xice, where, I am sorry 

 to say, he was robbed of a cloak and other goods ; thence to Avignon 

 again, and thence, as he hoped, in due course to the Abbey. 



But once more he had to turn about and revisit the Roman 

 Court ; for while he tarried at Master Southam's lodging in Avignon 

 in September, 1378, there came news of a murder committed in the 

 choir of the Abbey church, while the Gospel was being read at High 

 Mass, on August 11. The victim was one Eobert Hawle, who had 

 escaped from the Tower and taken sanctuary in the Abbey. The 

 incident raised all kinds of perilous questions, and Southam's advice 

 was that Colchester should hasten to Rome and counteract the plots 

 of the malefactors " perpetrantibus illud factum horribile." So now 

 there is another long roll of expenses — Avignon to Marseilles, a 

 passage in a galley to Ostia, most of December spent in Rome ; fees 

 on various occasions to the Pope's janitors for free entrance to the 

 Chamber and the Consistory, and to his valets for access to the 

 Pope himself ; an expensive struggle on each side to extract the sort 

 of Bull that each side desired, in which our man was apparently 

 successful ; a journey of forty-one days from Rome to Bruges ; a 

 wait of three weeks at Sluis for a passage across the Channel — "quod 

 non erat ausus transire per Calis' propter metum aduersariorum " — 

 and at last, by a way that was devious for the same reason, to AVest- 

 minster in November, 1379. It was not easy nor over-safe to be 

 the chosen representative of Westminster at the Roman Court. 



There are three indications that the Chapter which paid all these 

 expenses was satisfied with his execution of the task entrusted to 

 him. First, within a brief space, he was sent to Rome again in 

 1382, presumably on the same business. We should have no know- 

 ledge of the journey, if it were not for two stray documents. One 

 is the roll in which the Chamberlain of 1382-3 records the various 

 garments issued by him to the brethren ; for, mark you, our Chamber- 

 lain is so conscientious that he produces a balance-sheet in cloth as 

 well as one in £ s. d. ; and he notes that he did not give out " panni 

 nigri" — the black Benedictine habit— either to W. Colchester or 

 to W. Halle, another monk, " quia fuerunt Rome." The other is a 

 legal document * of which in all honesty I must give the purport. 

 Probably when he left Westminster in 1382 he knew that Richard 

 Excestr' was about to resign the Priorship ; anyhow, attempts seem 

 to have been made to induce the Pope to " provide " Colchester to 

 the vacant office — action which was an outrage on the prerogatives 



* Mun. 9503. 



