man; and the multitude complaining of thirst,
a fountain sprung out of the earth at his wish.
No wonder that Heaven, to avenge the death
of such a man, caused the eyes of the
executioner to drop out bodily the moment he struck
off the saint's head! The corpse of the martyr
lay undiscovered for three hundred and forty-
four years, when Offa, king of Mercia, wishing
to found a monastery in remorse for a son-in-
law he had murdered, a light from Heaven
revealed the holy grave. The king placed a
crown of gold round the skeleton's sacred
skull, and enriched the chapel over it with
plates of gold and silver, and tapestry. The
history of the relics in St. Albans Abbey is an
eventful one. In the reign of Athelstan (930)
the Danes, who had an appetite for all plunder,
sacred or profane, that was not too hot or too
heavy to remove, carried off the sacred bones,
which were, however, recovered by a daring
monk of St. Albans, who, after long service
as sacristan at the Scandinavian monastery to
which they had been conveyed, bored a hole
beneath the shrine, recovered the treasures,
and sent them back to Hertfordshire. In the
reign of Edward the Confessor, when the Danes
reappeared in England, the monks, afraid of
such rough visitors, hid away the holy bones
in a wall beneath the altar of St. Nicholas.
To cover their pious fraud the crafty
ecclesiastics sent some spurious relics to Ely, and
with them "a rough shabby old coat,"
supposed to be the disguise that St. Albanus lent
Amphibalus for his escape. The invasion over,
the rascally monks of Ely, with charming good
faith, refused to restore the spurious relics.

The dispute between the rival houses went
on with true monastic bitterness till 1256, when
the saint's coffin was conveniently discovered
under the abbey pavement, and the Pope
pronounced it authentic. The controversy,
however, always left the St. Albans relics doubtful.
It was said that King Canute had given away
a shoulder-blade of the saint. A church in
Germany swore by a leg-bone, and even now
a church at Cologne claims possession of a
good share of the skeleton supposed to have
been brought from St. Albans by Germanus
and Lupus, two French bishops who came over
to England in 1400. The miracles, indeed,
wrought by the saint's bones become even
more miraculous when we learn that after
Bede's time the site of the saint's grave was
entirely forgotten, and never ascertained
again, till the monks found it convenient to
find, or invent, a saint's body for King Offa.
The lights, the copes, the golden crosses, the
gold and silver figures, the votive jewels, are
all gone, but still in the Saint's Chapel, behind
the high altar, six small holes in the centre of
the blank area mark where the columns stood
that supported the canopy over the shrine.
There is scarcely in all England a quaint nook
so characteristic of mediæval life as the loft in
the eastern arch erected for the monk who
watched the golden shrine. At one end of this
loft there is a small staircase leading to a
narrow vestibule and a room which commands
a view of the whole side of the church. At
the east side of the abbey there used to be two
gratings, now walled up, through which peasants
were allowed to view the shrine.

In digging a vault for one Alderman Gape,
in 1703, close to the site of the saint's shrine,
the lucky sexton discovered the mummy of
Humphrey Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester,
the fourth son of Henry the Fourth. The
duke's shrine, built by his friend Abbot
Wheathamstead, still exists, adorned with
seventeen shields, and seventeen canopied
niches, filled with little squat figures of the
kings of Mercia. This is the duke whose wife,
Dame Eleanor, Shakespeare has shown us as
walking in penance through London streets
for having conspired, by witchcraft, against the
life of Henry the Sixth. Proud Margaret of
Anjou treated the duke as a conspirator, and
had him arrested while attending a parliament
at Bury St. Edmunds. Such birds seldom live
long in a cage, and seventeen days later the
duke was found dead in his bed—apoplexy,
avowed some; others whispered murder; but
the wise said a broken heart.

The crow cannot leave the abbey's old brick
tower without gratefully remembering that
that excellent early historian, Matthew of
Paris (so called from his French education),
was a monk of St. Albans. This honest and
candid opposer of Papal usurpations, high in the
favour of Henry the First, was a mathematician,
poet, orator, theologian, painter, and architect.
He died in the reign of Edward the First,
having completed the history of twenty-three
abbots of St. Albans, and what, perhaps, he
thought of less importance, the history of eight
English kings.

The savage Wars of the Roses twice
deluged St. Albans with blood. Hollinshead tells
the story of both conflicts with rough
picturesqueness. In the first, in 1455, the Duke
of York, with the king-maker Warwick, the
Earl of Salisbury, and Lord Cobham,
discontented with the Duke of Somerset, the
royal favourite, assembled an army of Welsh
horsemen, and marching towards London
encountered the weak and half-crazed king,
with his two thousand men. One May morning
at St. Albans the royal standard was
raised in St. Peter's-street; Lord Clifford
defended the town barriers. The Duke of York's
men were drawn up in Key Field, south-east
of the town. To the king's envoy the Yorkists
replied, "We are the king's true liegemen;
we intend him no harm; deliver us that bad
man, that traitor who lost Normandy,
neglected the defence of Gascony, and brought
the kingdom to this state, and we will instantly
return to our allegiance."

The king sounding trumpets and offering no
quarter, the Earl of Warwick drove back
the Lancastrians and entered the town through
a garden wall between the Key and the Chequer,
at the lower part of Holywell-street. The
fight was "right sharp and cruel," till the
Duke of Somerset fell at the Castle Inn (a
prophecy had bid him beware of castles), and