The Carmelite Friars have in our day a house in Kensington, which is famous for its music, and where for many years the magnificent voice of the great baritone Mr. Santley was often heard leading the choir-long after he had retired from the operatic stage and the concert-platform. There are, moreover, nine nunneries of this Order in England. In Ireland there are ten Carmelite friaries and as many nunneries.

A fourth Order of Friars was the Hermits of St. Augustin, popularly known as Austin Friars. They arrived in England in the thirteenth century. Like the Augustinian Canons, they claimed to derive their rule direct from St. Augustine himself, though with very slender proof. As a matter of fact they were an amalgamation of several congregations, which Pope Alexander IV. united under one rule in 1265. In the sixteenth century they numbered not less than 30,000 monks. Luther was a friar of this Order, and was attached to the mother-church at Wittenburg. At the Dissolution they had some thirty houses in England, of which the most celebrated were the friary at Oxford and the monastery in Austin Friars. The nave of the London church, converted in Edward the Sixth's time into a chapel for the use of Dutch Protestants, is still standing, though considerably altered. To-day this Order has one London House at Hoxton, and nine in Ireland. In Stowe's time, the steeple of Austin Friars was a "most fine spired steeple, small, high and straight," but it was in a very unsafe condition, so "the beautifullest and rarest" of our spires was sacrificed-it being "a fearful imminent danger to all the inhabitants next adjoining." The pre-Reformation monuments in the church were exceeding splendid and interesting, but they have all been swept away. The Cistercians, a contemplative and agricultural Order, were also established in the outskirts of London at St. Mary's Graces, East-Minster or New Abbey, a large monastery founded by Edward III. in 1350 after the cessation of the Black Death, with a noble church, almost equalling Westminster in size and riches.

The Crutched or Crossed Friars, fratres de sacco, was another popular Order, established in 1298 by Ralph Hosier and William Sabernes in a large house between Jewry, Aldgate and Mark Lane. They derived their popular name from the cross on their garments, and were originally a nursing Order who attended the

poor. In course of time their house became rich, and their church magnificent. The last Prior, according to Thomas Cromwell, was a very scandalous person, but one must take Cromwell's official stories of monastic iniquity with a very big pinch of salt. Suppressed at the Dissolution, their church fell to ruin, and their hall was converted into a glass-blower's factory, being destroyed by an explosion in 1575. Henry VIII. gave the land on which this ancient monastery stood to Sir Thomas Wyatt, who built himself a mansion on the site, now (1904) occupied by the East and West India Dock Company's huge pile of buildings.

CHAPTER IX

LONDON IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

N the year 1272 Henry the Third's long reign came to a close

was still far from the English shores. He had taken the Cross and travelled to the Holy Land with his beloved and beautiful spouse Eleanor of Castile. At the time of his father's death he had turned his face homeward, and was tarrying to visit the Pope at Viterbo, in Italy. Thence the royal couple passed to Paris, and spent several months in Guienne, before taking final and formal possession of the English throne. It was not, then, until the first week in August 1274, that the new sovereigns made their state entry into London, to be crowned at Westminster. They were hailed during their progress through the city with demonstrations of the wildest joy. Popular ardour was still hot for the Crusades, and every street, so Holinshed tells us, "was hung with rich cloth-of-gold, arras, and tapestry." The aldermen and burgesses threw handfuls of gold and silver out of their windows to denote "the great gladness which they conceived of King Edward's safe return from Palestine, and the conduits ran with white and red wine, that each creature might drink his fill," which each creature did to the utmost of his capacity-the number of incapables after this great "free drink" attracting contemporary notice, and even unfavourable criticism. The royal hospitality was as generous, in its way, as that of the city. The area of Palace Yard, Old and New, was filled with wooden buildings, improvised kitchens, open at the roof to let the smoke of the cooking-fires escape. Here for a whole fortnight a succession of bountiful banquets was served to all comers, rich and poor, gentle and simple; but altogether the