ceived), that there he should come to great distress; or else, upon the same occasion, did happen to lodge at a place beginning and ending with the same. syllable of An (as this of Anbian), that there he should lose his life, to expiate that wicked murder of his late wife Anne, daughter and coheir of Richard Neville Earl of Salisbury and Warwick." This is essentially a local tradition. The prediction and the vision were in all likelihood rife in Sutton, and Shenton, and Sibson, and Coton, and Dadlington, and Stapleton, and Atherston, in the days of Shakspere's boyhood. Anbian, or Ambiam, a small wood, is in the centre of the plain called Bosworth Field. Tradition has pointed out a hillock where Richard harangued his army; and also a little spring, called King Richard's Well. Dr. Parr, about forty years ago, found out a well "in dirty, mossy ground," in the midst of this plain; and then a Latin inscription was to be set up to enlighten the peasantry of the district, and to preserve the memory of the spot for all time. Two words about the well in Shakspere would have given it a better immortality. King Henry is crowned upon the Field of Bosworth. According to the Chronicler, Lord Stanley "took the crown of King Richard, which was found amongst the spoil in the field, and set it on the Earl's head, as though he had been elected king by the voice of the people, as in ancient times past in divers realms it hath been accustomed." Then, "the same night in the evening King Henry with great pomp came to the town of Leicester," where he rested two days. 'In the mean season the dead corpse of King Richard was as shamefully carried to the town of Leicester, as he gorgeously the day before with pomp and pride departed out of the said town." Years roll on. There was another conqueror, not by arms but by peaceful intellect, who had once moved through the land in "pomp and pride," but who came to Leicester in humility and heaviness of heart. The victim of a shifting policy and of his own ambition, Wolsey, found a grave at Leicester scarcely more honourable than that of Richard : "At last, with easy roads, he came to Leicester, So went to bed; where eagerly his sickness He gave his honours to the world again, His blessed part to heaven, and slept in peace."' Henry VIII., Act Iv., Scene II. Wolsey is the hero of Shakspere's last historical play; and even in this history, large as it is, and belonging to the philosophical period of the poet's life, we may trace something of the influence of the principle of Local Association. ་་ 66 High towers, fair temples, goodly theatres,. SUCH is Spenser's noble description of what was once the "goodly Verlam." These were "The Ruins of Time." But within sixteen miles of Stratford would the young Shakspere gaze in awe and wonder upon ruins more solemn than any produced by "time's decay." The ruins of Evesham were the fearful monuments of a political revolution which William Shakspere himself had not seen; but which, in the boyhood of his father, had shaken the land like an earthquake, and, toppling down its "high steeples," had made many "An heap of lime and sand, For the screech-owl to build her baleful bower." Such were the ruins he looked upon, cumbering the ground where, forty years before, stood the magnificent abbey whose charters reached back to the days of the Kings of Mercia. The last great building of the Abbey of Evesham is the only one properly belonging to the monastery which has escaped destruction. The campanile which formed an entrance to the conventual cemetery was commenced by Abbot Lichfield in 1533. In 1539 the good abbot resigned the office which he had held for twenty-six years. His successor was placed in authority for a few months to carry on the farce which was enacting through the kingdom, of a voluntary grant and surrender of all the remaining possessions of the religious houses, which preceded the Act of 1539 "for dissolution of abbeys." Leland, who visited the place within a year or two after the suppression," rambling to and fro in this nation, and in making researches into the bowels of antiquity," says, "In the town is no hospital, or other famous foundation, but the late abbey." The destruction must indeed have been rapid. The house and site of the monastery were granted to Philip Hobby, with a remarkable exception; namely, "all the bells and lead of the church and belfry." The roof of this magnificent fabric thus went first; and in a few years the walls became a stonequarry. Fuller, writing about a century afterwards, says of the abbey, "By a long lease it was in the possession of one Mr. Andrewes, father and son; whose grandchild, living now at Berkhampstead in Hertfordshire, hath better thriven, by God's blessing on his own industry, than his father and grandfather did with Evesham Abbey; the sale of the stones whereof he imputeth a cause of their ill success." All was swept away. The abbey-church, with its sixteen altars, and its hundred and sixty-four gilded pillars, its chapter-house, its cloisters, its library, refectory, dormitory, buttery, and treasury; its almery, granary. and storehouse; all the various buildings for the service of the church, and for the accommodation of eighty-nine religious inmates and sixty-five servants, were, with a few exceptions, ruins in the time of William Shakspere. Habingdon, who has left a manuscript Survey of Worcestershire,' written about two centuries ago, says, "Let us but guess what this monastery now dissolved was in former days by the gate-house yet remaining; which, though deformed with age, is as large and stately as any at this time in the kingdom." That gateway has since perished. Of the great mass of the conventual buildings Habingdon states that nothing was left beyond "a huge deal of rubbish overgrown with glass. One beautiful gateway, however, formerly the entrance to the chapterhouse, yet remains even to our day. It admits us to a large garden, now let out in su.all allotments to poor and industrious inhabitants of Evesham. The change is very striking. The independent possession of a few roods of land may perhaps bestow as much comfort upon the labourers of Evesham as their former dependence upon the conventual buttery. But we cannot doubt that, for a long course of years, the sudden and violent dissolution of that great abbey must have produced incalculable poverty and wretchedness. Its princely revenues were seized upon by the heartless despot, to be applied to his unbridled luxury and his absurd wars. The same process of destruction and appropriation was carried on throughout the country. The Church, always a gentle landlord, was succeeded in its possessions by the grasping creatures of the Crown; the almsgiving of the religious houses was at an end; and then came the age of vagabondage and of poor-laws. The general effects of the dissolution of the abbeys have been well described by Edmund Howes: "In the time of Henry VIII. the clergy was exceeding rich and powerful, and were endowed with wondrous stately palaces and great possessions, so as in every city, and county, and towns corporate, and in very many remote places, then were very strong and sumptuous houses for religious persons: as abbeys, priories, friaries, monks regular, minories, chantries, nunneries, and such-like; at which time the clergy grew proud, negligent, and secure, presuming, like the Knights Templars, upon their proper greatness, as well in regard of the reasons aforesaid, as that every Lord Abbot and Lord Prior that wore mitre sat in the upper Parliament and had free voices, as Barons, subsistent with the Bishops. The Lords, and Ladies Abbesses, of which houses were usually of noble birth, and sometime of the blood royal, as well women as men ; for by this time, through the charitable devotion and special affection of former kings, princes, peers, and common people, the monasteries were SO much increased, gloriously builded and adorned, and plenteously endowed with large privileges, possessions, and all things necessary. Albeit they relieved the poor, and raised no rents, nor took excessive fines, yet they many ways neglected |