Notes on Bermondsey Abbey. - — 105 
the right may be seen his charger’s head. The background is 
filled in with dome-topped gateway and fortified walls, and two 
trees, one a palm, the other trefoil-headed. The whole is no 
doubt from some current picture, probably of a legend of the 
Crusades: the costumes therefore would be no safe guide to the 
date of the plate. Round the boss is a band in silver gilt in vine 
foliage and grapes of early design; and on the rim spirally twisted 
lobes alternately concave and convex, with foliage ornament in 
the spandrils. The marks of the compasses inside the lobes are 
very distinct.’’ * ; 
In the garden of the vicarage of St. Mary Magdalen’s is the 
jamb of one of the fireplaces from Bermondsey House. 
One curious relic has recently been found on the site of the 
Abbey—a small box made of thin pewter, about 7 in. long by 
14 in. deep by about 24 in. wide at one end and 2 in. at the 
other (I speak from memory), somewhat of the shape of a coffin. 
On the inside of the lid, which apparently had been soldered on, 
are some ruled lines of dots forming a chess-board pattern in 
squares of about 4 in. There are also one or two letters stamped 
on the metal. The ruling appears to have been upon the metal 
originally, and has no connection with the object of the case 
itself, the metal having simply been cut from a ruled sheet when 
required for making the case or casket. The British Museum 
authorities I understand cannot identify the use of the case. 
I suggest it was a reliquary to contain some precious object. 
I hope I have not tired you with this description of one of our 
famous Abbeys. To walk through Bermondsey now and to try 
to picture what it was a hundred years ago, when the fields were 
still open; to go back further and try to imagine it in the early 
part of the sixteenth century, when the Abbey was in its glory; 
when the Monastery of St. Mary Overie existed in Southwark, 
when the great houses of Winchester and Rochester stood in the 
Borough, and the famous inns down the High Street were full of 
guests; or to think of it still earlier, when the Monastery of Ber- 
mondsey stood isolated in green fields surrounded with streams 
in the fourteenth century, and the ‘Tabard’ was cared for by that 
right merry man the Hoste, who with the Merchant and the Cook, 
the Wife of Bath and the Monk, with the Somnour and the Miller 
and the rest of the jovial crew, a rollicking party, tempered only 
by the gentle presence of the Prioresse and the Clerk of Oxen- 
ford and the poore Parsoun of a towne, went down the Kent 
Road past St. Thomas a Waterings, leaving St. Saviour’s of Ber- 
mondsey on their left—is a pleasant occupation, and one which 
may afford some of us, at all events, a pleasant relief to necessary 
business walks and occupations. 
* «The Church Plate of Surrey,’ Rev. T. S. Cooper, M.A., F.S.A. 
