legendary growths. Holinshed (p. 275) gives an accurate account of the first coming of the relic. The annalist of the house of Hayles, who was contemporary of the event which he chronicles, writes under the year 1267 in regard to his founders and patrons (Pertz, Scriptt. xvi., p. 483) that it was they who enriched the abbey with the relic. According to the habits of mind in those days it was natural that the founders of a religious house, especially of that in which they hoped to find a mortal resting place, should seek to enrich such a foundation with some notable relic. Richard of Cornwall, the founder, was king of the Romans, and he and his son Edmund were in a position to obtain in Germany, for such an object, even a relic held in the highest veneration. We may be quite sure

their houses of Hayles

that for the great relics of and Ashridge they would do the best that in them lay. I have been unable to identify the locality from which Edmund obtained the relic. It is called by the monk of Hayles Doilaunde (so the MS.; Pertz prints Dilaunde), but in all probability he never saw this name written, but took it down from the lips of others. Still, we may, with great probability, conjecture that the relic of the Holy Blood, obtained by the earl of Cornwall, was one of the numerous relics, the spoils of the imperial chapels and great sanctuaries of Constantinople, brought into Germany after the sack of that city by the Latins in the year 1204. It may be mentioned that

Conrad von Krosigk, bishop of Halberstadt, one of the chiefs of the Latin host, brought back as apparently the chief among the numerous relics obtained by him "Sanguis Domini Nostri Fhesu Christi," till then preserved in the church of St. Sophia; and this relic was not among those which on his resignation of the see in 1208, he bestowed on his cathedral (see Riant, "Exuviæ Sacræ Constantinopolitana" i., p. 20, ii., pp. 84-85, and Riant, Dépouilles religieuses, etc., in " Mém. de la Soc. des Antiquaires de France," xxxvi., p. 192).

Knowing thus how the relic was obtained by the monastery, and that, whatever may be thought of the blood, the relic and reliquary were known to the monks of Hayles as a venerated trust and memorial of their founders, there can be no doubt among reasonable men that the object which was opened and examined by Latimer, the prior of Worcester, and the abbot of Hayles was the same which had been placed in the monastery by Edmund of Cornwall and his father, and that it was no craft of devilish soulquellers."

Much the same may be said of another venerated tradition which has long prevailed concerning the

Rood of Boxley." See the whole of this question dealt with and the evidence drawn out at length in an article by the Rev. F. Bridgett, entitled "How a Lie Grows," in the Dublin Review, 1887.

APPENDIX V.

INDEX TO THE MAPS.

The map in the first volume showed the houses of the four great orders of friars, and those of the Carthusians.

The four following maps show the distribution of the English houses:

I. of Black monks (Benedictines, Cluniacs);

II. of White monks (Cistercians);

III. of Regular canons, Black (Augustinian), and White (Premonstratensian); and

IV. the Nunneries.

They are designed to represent the state of the different orders in the reign of Henry VIII., and do not include houses which were suppressed or died out before 1509.

Even so, these maps are not a complete presentment of the religious houses in England at the time of the suppression. The houses of the Trinitarian and Crutched Friars, the Bonhommes, and a few others (some thirty in all), to say nothing of the establishments of the Knights of St. John, are not given. There is also a much more considerable omission. No account is taken of the hospitals served by a community, sometimes numerous, of canons or sisters generally observing the rule of St. Austin. It may fairly be objected that a plan must be very defective which should fail to include a community (to take a modern instance) of the same kind as that of the Austin nuns of the Hotel Dieu of Rouen, counting centuries of honoured existence. But, in the first place, the maps are only intended to illustrate this book. And, secondly, the perfectly legitimate dissatisfaction of the antiquary or inquirer at the somewhat arbitrary rule of exclusion here adopted may help to bring home the difficulty adverted to p. 524 ante, which must have made it next to impossible in practice, when once the destruction of the monasteries was determined on, to draw a sharp line between monastic and charitable foundations.

It is hoped before long, however, to meet a want long felt by issuing a handy historical atlas of ancient ecclesiastical England which shall show the alien priories and destroyed monasteries, as

well as those suppressed by Henry VIII., together with hospitals and even chantries; and include references to the Ministers' Accounts, and similar documents. Such an atlas, to be of real value, must be based on the records of the Augmentation Office, etc., of which so much use has been made in this book. Considerable progress

has been already made in gathering the necessary materials.

In the following index the numerous aliases have been passed over. Cells have been ranged under the monasteries to which they belonged, but a cross reference is given at its proper place in the general alphabetical list.

A few remarks are necessary on the question of "cells." The word "cell" is familiar to antiquaries; but it may be doubted if there are many who (beyond the general idea that it implies dependence as against autonomy) are prepared to answer with any precision the question: What is a "cell?" and what makes this house a "cell" and that one not? Is it necessary to the idea of a “cell” that those who live in it should be professed monks of the mother house, or may they be professed for the dependent house in which they actually live? In other words, are the monks of the "cell" removable or not? Is it necessary the prior should be dative and removable, or dative only and not removable; or may he be elective of the professed of the so-called cell, and only presented to the bishop for confirmation by the superior of the mother-house? Is the fact that a yearly pension is the only apparent connection between the two houses enough to settle that the house so paying pension is not a cell? May a house which was started as a cell have ceased at the suppression to be one, though no direct documentary evidence can be produced on the point? Is an establishment still to be considered a "cell" where the "mansion-house" is inhabited by one or two " parish priests" serving the parish church, or perhaps a bailiff, whilst the revenue and title of prior are conferred on some senior or emeritus of the parent monastery, who in all probability may not regularly reside at the "cell?" These are some of the questions which arise in compiling such a list as the following (which includes, by the way, at least one example of this last class).

The case of the Cluniacs has special features of its own. The word "cell" among them had its special meaning, and implied much the same system as the paternity system among the Cistercians and White Canons (Premonstratensians). The Black Canons

followed the freer, and, so to speak, more generous plan of the Benedictines proper, which though it maintained a central bond in their general chapter, yet left each house a real autonomy, allowed it full scope for its own natural development, and did not aim at bringing all to a common level, which, so long as monks are men, will, in the long run, ever tend to be the level of the lower, not the aspiration for the higher. The difference of the two systems explains how, when once decadence fairly set in, all efforts to bring back the orders of Cluny and Citeaux to better things have been, speaking broadly, unsuccessful; whilst the history of the mere Benedictines-that "organization, diverse, complex, irregular and variously ramified, rich rather than symmetrical, with many origins and centres and new beginnings, and the action of local influences, like some great natural growth"-is, if a story of continual failure to maintain themselves at the level of their own ideal, yet a story of a perpetual, a persistent, a varied and multiform renewal.

As to the organization of the English Cluniacs in the reign of Henry VIII. we are quite in the dark, although Sir G. F. Duckett's Cluni Charters and Records has thrown much light on their history generally. Unfortunately the document settling the relations of the English houses to Lewes, which is the necessary complement of the bull of Sixtus IV. freeing that house from its subjection to Cluny (Duckett, ii., 92), is not at present forthcoming. In all probability, however, this settlement would be on the lines of the "Memorie misse per priores Anglie, que sunt una magna fatuitas" (ibid., ii., 22-24), drawn up about 1415. Long before this there seem to have been irregularities; for instance, the priors of Daventry and Monk Bretton, though these were certainly Cluniac houses, appear as belonging to the General Chapter of the Benedictines proper. The Cluniac "cells" are in the list below reduced to a very small number; and not merely such great houses as Castleacre, but even Torkesley and Wangford are treated as conventual priories.

The reasons for the treatment of individual cases cannot be here developed; but it may be well to say that the list has been drawn up with a wish rather to keep to the lines of existing antiquarian tradition, so to speak, than to introduce novelties, and that that tradition has accordingly not been departed from in any instance without, as it seemed, necessity. The whole subject is one which well deserves examination. The question whether such and such