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 be 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 1545, 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 cofiSn, 
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 
