in conformity with a licence granted to the dean and canons by King Edward I., upon information given to him, that by the lurking of thieves and other disorderly persons in the night-time within the ground-which, although partly enclosed, was yet accessible to any body-divers robberies and homicides, not to speak of much immorality of other kinds, had been ofttimes committed therein. The licence, which was dated at Westminster, on the 10th of June, "for the honour of God and holy church, and of those saints whose bodies were buried therein, as also for the better security of the canons and officers belonging thereto," gave permission that the ground should be inclosed "with a wall on every side, with fitting gates and posterns therein, to be opened every morning, and closed at night."* After the reign of Henry III., we read of no more Folkmotes being held at Paul's Cross. Indeed, a few years after the accession of Edward I., as we have just seen, the assembling of the Folkmote seems to be spoken of rather as a thing that had been than that was still in use. It is remarkable that the same period in our history which witnessed, if not the original institution, at least the complete establishment, of the Commons' House of Parliament, should have been that in which this ancient court of the commonalty of London fell into desuetude, or lost its importance with its old form and character. But the age of the introduction of representative government was perhaps naturally that of the decay and extinction of government by assemblies of the whole people. The northern part of St. Paul's Churchyard, however, still continued to be the Forum of the Londoners, and the Cross to be the station from which, in those days, when as yet there was no printing and little reading, announcements and harangues on all such matters as the authorities in church or state judged to be of public concern were poured into the popular ear and heart. Stow, who by the bye places it" about the midst" of the churchyard-and in fact it was only a very little to the east of Canon Alley-describes it as "a pulpit-cross of timber, mounted upon steps of stone, and covered with lead;"† and this was probably its form before as well as after his day. We may conjecture that it came first to be used for ecclesiastical purposes after the ground on which it stood was taken into the churchyard in the reign of Edward I.; at least the earliest occasion on which it is recorded to have been so employed was in the year 1299, when, according to a notice in Stow, "the dean of Paul's accursed at Paul's Cross all those which had searched in the church of St. Martin in the Field for an hoard of gold, &c."‡ A curse pronounced from this famous pulpit was sure to be heard far and wide upon earth, whether it went up to heaven or not. Very soon after this date we begin to hear of sermons regularly preached from Paul's Cross. In 1361, Michael de Northburgh, bishop of London, in bequeathing a sum of a thousand marks to be placed in a chest in the treasury of the Cathedral, to form a sort of Mont de Piété, or fund for loans upon pledges (but without interest), directed that if in any case at the year's end the sums borrowed were not repaid, then the preacher at Paul's Cross should in his sermon declare that the pledge would be sold within fourteen days, if not forthwith redeemed. The good bishop, by the bye, did not contemplate benefiting the lower orders of his countrymen only by this judicious charity. In those times, when the little + Survey. *Dugdale, p. 12. Ib. commerce existing was still in great part a commerce of barter, money was often scarce even with those who had plenty of everything else; accordingly it was here provided that, while a poor layman might borrow to the extent of ten pounds from the fund, the dean or any of the principal canons of the Cathedral might have a loan of twice that sum, a citizen or nobleman one to the same amount, and the bishop of the diocese one of forty or even of nearly fifty pounds.* It would be interesting to know if any of the noble or right reverend borrowers was ever proclaimed as a defaulter at the Cross; and also whether on occasion of such occurrences it was customary for the preacher to adapt his discourse to the case in hand, as would seem to be implied by the regulation that he should make the announcement in the course of his sermon. It is easy to conceive how forcibly he might illustrate certain of the moral duties by the happy application of this method-how the precept might not only be sent home by the example, as by the blow of a hammer, but the example itself might, according to the Horatian rule, be made more stimulating by being addressed to the eyes as well as to the ears of the congregation, through the actual exhibition of the forfeited pledge from the pulpit-of the humbler tradesman's holiday suit or best yew bow, the merchant's bale of broad-cloth, the nobleman's silver drinking-cup, or the bishop's holy book or richest mule-trappings. Indeed the register of this ancient pawnbroking establishment would be altogether one of the most curious relics of the middle ages if it could be recovered; but it has no doubt perished long ago, as well as the good bishop's legacy itself, with the chest, secured by three keys, in which it was kept, and the pledges of the last borrowers, upon whom probably the Reformation, or some other earlier convulsion, came suddenly some fine morning, foreclosing all redemption. But to return to the sermons. In 1388 the then bishop, Robert de Braybroke, in certain letters addressed to his clergy, describes Paul's Cross-"the high cross standing in the greater churchyard of our cathedral"—as the station from which the word of God was in use to be preached to the people in the most public and distinguished part of the cemetery. The object of the bishop's letters was to call upon his clergy to stir up their flocks to contribute to the repair of the Cross, which " was then grown ruinous by reason of winds and tempests." It is said to have suffered, with many other buildings, by the earthquake which was felt all over the south of England on the morning of the 21st of May, 1382. Stow records that in Kent especially "it sunk some churches and threw them down to the earth."+ The restoration of Paul's Cross was taken up as a matter in which the church over the whole kingdom was concerned. Other letters, inviting the faithful to assist in the good work, were written by the Archbishop of Canterbury ; "as also," continues Dugdale, "the Bishops of Ely, Bath, Coventry and Lichfield, Llandaff, and Bangor sent out at the same time, promising indulgence of forty days to all such as (de peccatis suis vere penitentibus, confessis, et contritis)‡ should contribute thereto." It is affirmed that considerable contributions were in this way drawn from the pockets of the people, but that Braybroke and the other bishops, instead of applying the money to the pious purpose for which it was * Dugdale. † Annals. "For their sins truly repenting, having made confession, and felt contrition:" the condition expressed in all papal indulgences. professedly collected, put it, or the greater part of it, into their own pockets. What seems to be certain is, that no considerable repair of the Cross was executed at this time, nor till about half a century afterwards, when it was rebuilt by one of Braybroke's successors, John Kemp, who held the see from 1422 to 1426. Dugdale notices that Kemp's arms were to be seen in sundry places of the leaden cover of the Cross. One of the earliest sermons, if not the very earliest, recorded to have been preached at Paul's Cross, is still preserved, and may be found printed at full length, from a manuscript of the time, in Fox's Book of Martyrs. It was preached on Quinquagesima Sunday, in the year 1389, by a certain learned clerk of the name of R. Wimbeldon, and is altogether a highly curious specimen both of the language and of the popular theology of that age. When we state that the zealous martyrologist strongly recommends it to his readers as "a godly and most fruitful sermon," it will be understood that it is no declamation in honour either of pope or saint. Indeed it might almost be suspected, from the strain in which he runs on, that Wimbeldon had adopted most of the opinions of his reforming contemporary, Wyclif; unless it was that before the Reformation the peculiar tenets which now distinguish the Romanists were really not wont to be so much insisted upon in preaching to the people as they naturally came to be after they were made the main subjects of contention between the two hostile parties that divided Christendom. Nor does it appear that a man brought his orthodoxy into question in those days merely by inveighing, however freely, against the corruptions of the church, and the pride, luxury, ambition, hypocrisy, or other vices of the clergy. Many other productions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries have come down to us, besides this sermon of Wimbeldon's, in which a tone is taken in regard to such matters that would hardly have been ventured upon by any Romanist in a later age; we need only mention the Visions of Pierce Ploughman, many of Chaucer's poems, and the History of Matthew Paris; but, although the followers of Luther were afterwards fond of claiming the authors of these works as fellow-reformers, and altogether of their faith and party, it does not appear that any one of them was in his own day regarded as other than a good Catholic, for all his philippics and sarcasms. Wimbeldon takes his text from the parable of the unjust steward, as related in the sixteenth chapter of St. Luke-selecting the words "Redde rationem villicationis tuæ,” which he translates, "Yield reckoning of thy bailly," and applies to the different classes of men with much sharpness and good sense, enlivening his address, ever and anon, with a legend from St. Augustine or some other of the old fathers, or an illustration from the every-day occupations of his hearers, in the happiest style of popular oratory. The entire discourse occupies eleven of Fox's long and closely-printed columns.† * Dugdale, on the authority of Godwin de Præsulibus. Kemp, whom Dugdale here, by mistake, calls Thomas, was afterwards successively archbishop of York and archbishop of Canterbury, besides being lord chancellor and a cardinal. We transcribe a few sentences, modernising the old spelling, where it does not affect the sound, to give the curious reader a taste of what sort of preaching was to be heard at Paul's Cross nearly five hundred years ago:-" Right as ye seeth," Wimbeldon begins his explanation of his text, "that, in tilling of the material vine, there ben divers labours; for some cutten away the void branches, some maken forks and rails to bearen up the vine, and some diggen away the old earth fro the rote, and lain there fatter; and all this offices ben so necessary to the vine, that, if any of them fail, it shall harm greatly other [or] destroy the vines; for, but Early in the next century Paul's Cross figures in a transaction so curiously characteristic of the times, and in its whole course so startling to modern manners and notions, that the relation ought not to be attempted by any modern pen, and we will therefore give the details in the homely but graphic words of the old chronicler. "On Easter-day in the afternoon," Stow records under the year 1417, "at a sermon in St. Dunstan's in the east of London, a great fray happened in the church, wherethrough many people were sore wounded, and one Thomas Petwarden, fishmonger, slain out of hand: wherefore the church was suspended, and the beginners of the fray, which was the Lord Strange and Sir John Tussell, knight, through the quarrel of their two wives, were brought to the Compter in the Poultry. The Archbishop of Canterbury caused them to be excommunicate, as well at Paul's Cross as in all other parish churches of the city. The 21st of April the said Archbishop sate at St. Magnus to inquire of the authors of that disorder, where he found the fault to be in the Lord Strange and his wife; who, upon the first of May following, in Paul's Church, before the Archbishop, the Mayor of London, and others, submitted themselves to penance, which was enjoined them, that immediately all their servants should in their shirts go before the parson of St. Dunstan's from Paul's to St. Dunstan's church, and the lord bare-headed, with his lady bare-footed, Reignold Kenwood, Archdeacon of London, following them; and at the hallowing of the church the lady should fill all the vessels with water, and also offer an ornament of ten pound, and the Lord Strange should offer a pix of five pound."* A scolding match, or, for aught appears, an actual rencontre of talons or fisticuffs, in the church, between the wives of a knight and a nobleman--the flying to arms of probably the greater part of the congregation--the blood made to flow in all directions-the slaughter outright of the poor fishmonger-make an appropriate prologue of the savage and horrible to the comedy that follows, of the procession along Fleet Street, led by the parson in his canonicals, and brought up by the bare-headed lord and bare-footed lady; while, in admirable keeping with the absurdity of the whole exhibition, the principal part of the performance is vicariously sustained by the poor shivering menials-a pretty long string, we may suppose, of both sexes,who, one would think, might not unfairly have been presumed to have suffered penance enough already in the service of a mistress requiring so sharp a discipline to keep her in order. It is a comfort to find, however, that the termagant that if [unless] the vine be cut, she shall wax wild; but if she be railed, she shall be overgo with nettles and weeds; but if the rote be fatted with dong, she for feebleness should wax barren ;-right so in the Church beth needful these three offices; priesthood, knighthood, and labourers. To priests it falleth to cut away the void branches of sins with the swerd of her [their] tongue. To knighthood it falleth to letten [prevent] wrongs and thefts to ben done, and to maintain God's law and them that ben teachers thereof, and also to keep the land from enemies of other lands. And to labourers it falleth to travail bodilich, and, with their sore sweat, getten out of the earth bodilech livehood for hem [themselves] and other parties." Even this simple passage is not wholly unsuggestive as to the state of things in England in that day, were such our present subject. The only other quotation we shall make is of a few sentences from Wimbeldon's picture of the clergy of his day. "How the life of priests," he exclaims, "is changed! They be clothen as knights, they speaken as carls, other [or] of winning as marchants; they riden as princes; and all that is thus spended is of the goods of poor men and of Christ's heritage. In these [things] travaileth prelates, that ben too much blent with too much shining of riches, that make them houses like churches in greatness, that with divers pointries coloren their chambers, that with divers clothings of colours make images gay; but the poor man for default of clothes beggeth, and with an empty womb crieth at the door." * Annals. was obliged to fill the water-vessels with her own noble hands, and, apparently, unassisted and unattended by either servants or husband. These are the incidents that paint an age. Nothing can bring more forcibly home to us than such a strange narrative as this the difference between the London of our own day and that of three hundred years ago. It makes one wonder if the sun shone then as it does now-if our ancestors of that remote date were actually wide awake, and did not move about in a sort of mere somnambulous condition-at any rate, if they possessed any sense of the ludicrous or faculty of laughter, that they could look on gravely while such fantastic tricks were played before high heaven. Another remarkable appearance, also of a penitential character, that was made at Paul's Cross some years after this, is likewise described, with all its details, by Stow-the recantation of the learned and pious Reginald Pecocke, bishop of Chichester, who "having laboured many years," says the annalist, "to translate the holy scripture into English, was accused to have passed the bounds of divinity and of Christian belief in certain articles." On the 4th of December, 1457, he was brought to Paul's Cross, and there renounced his heresies, and made profession of his deep contrition and entire submission to holy church in a formal harangue “in his mother tongue," which Stow gives at full length. And "after this," concludes the account, "he was deprived of his bishoprick, having a certain pension assigned unto him for to live on in an abbey, and soon after he died.” And, doubtless, he himself then felt that it would have been better had he died somewhat sooner. Little more than two years before these high-handed proceedings against Bishop Pecocke, which may be regarded as a sort of commencement of the war between the old and the new opinions in religion, the first swords had been crossed at St. Alban's in the war of the Roses, which was to make the best blood in the land flow like water throughout the greater part of the next quarter of a century. Passing over that space, comprising the remainder of the reign and life of Henry VI., and the whole of the reign of Edward IV., we come, in what may be called the last act of the long, tumultuous drama, to perhaps the most remarkable day in the history of Paul's Cross. It is towards the latter end of June, in the year 1483. The young king, Edward V., who had been escorted from Hornsey to the bishop's palace, close by the cathedral, on the 4th of May, by the lord mayor, the sheriffs, "and all the other aldermen in scarlet, with five hundred horse of the citizens in violet," had been soon after, along with his brother, carried "from thence through the city honourably into the Tower, out of which after that day they never came abroad;" Crookbacked Richard directed all things as Lord Protector; Lord Hastings, arrested in the council-room at the Tower on the morning of Friday, the 13th of June, had had his head immediately struck off, "upon a long log of timber," on "the green beside the chapel;" the Lord Grey, with his fellow-prisoners, had been executed before the gate of Pontefract Castle, on the same day; Lord Rivers lay there in his dungeon, about to follow his friends to the scaffold; Lord Stanley, the Archbishop of York, and the Bishop of Ely, were all under the lock and key of the tyrant; "then thought the Protector, that, while men mused what the matter meant, while the lords of the realm were about him out of their own strengths, while no man wist what to |