rable "Battle of the Standard." Yet, I cannot refrain from portraying him to you when, in his harangue to the army, he swore, grasping the hand of the Earl of Albermarle,' on that field to be victorious or to die, and roused the religious enthusiasm of the hearers by the assurance that "angels and the saints of the churches which the enemy had profaned, would fight with them from the clouds and avenge the innocent." "He was now says his illustrious friend Aelred, abbot of Rivaulx, the historian of the battle-"an old man, and full of days, quick witted, prudent in council, moderate in peace, circumspect in war, a true friend and a loyal subject. His stature was passing tall, his limbs all of such size as not to exceed their just proportions, and yet to be well matched with his great height. His hair was still black, his beard long, and flowing, his forehead wide and noble, his eyes large and bright, his face broad but well featured, his voice like the sound of a trumpet, setting off his natural eloquence of speech with a certain majesty of sound."

Such was our founder, fourteen years after arrows sharper than those he braved on that day had pierced his breast. So magnificent a soul has seldom been as fitly lodged in its tenement of clay!

After a similar revolution of time, he retired from the strife and contention of the world, and, singularly enough, chose his home, not at Kirkham, but at Rivaulx: drawn thither, it may have been, by a desire for more intimate and daily communion with the abbot Aelred; of whom it is now enough to say that he was "neither in piety or genius unworthy of his master, St. Bernard."

After passing about two years in monastic seclusion, Espec died in the year 1153--his wife surviving him-and was buried on the 9th of March, at Rivaulx, far away from him whose loss had embittered his soul. Yet, let us humbly hope that they who were thus sadly severed, both in life and in death, have not parted at the gates of heaven.

Amid the ruin of that beautiful and noble pile, which " once was holy and is holy still," there is, now, left no memorial to guide even a sympathizing pilgrim to his grave-nothing to protect his once venerated form from the intrusion of the meanest hind.

(1) In 1139, on the feast of St. Hilary, the Earl of Albermarle, who has been styled "præclarus comes et eximius monasteriorum fundator," founded the Priory of Thornton in Lincolnshire; and in the following year, and on the same feast, "Waltheof- his kinsman, and Prior of Kirkham-went to Thornton, taking with him twelve canons of Kirkham, whom he established in the new monastery, constituting one of them, named Richard, the first Prior.

It would avail little, for a purpose like the present, to investigate the topography of Kirkham before the foundation of the Priory. Yet, it may be useful to remark that when the Domesday survey was taken it was a large and important manor, consisting of eight carucates or upwards of eight hundred acres of land, which in the Saxon times had belonged to the powerful Waltheof, but then to the Earl of Moreton. That it had suffered its share in the military ravages that had depreciated the value of all the adjoining property. That a mill had been advantageously worked by the river Derwent; and that woodlands, a mile long by ten perches broad, fringed the banks of that lovely streamthat must have sighed in the ears of the Conqueror's surveyors with the same fitful melancholy cadence as might have solaced our hearts to-day. It had also, at that early period, a church, and even an endowed minister. Judging, therefore, as much from its Saxon name, "Chircham," or the Church-stead, as from its immediate proximity to a great river and an influential nucleus of civilization at Malton, we may not err much in believing that it had been one of those early missionary stations where the site of the mother church had marked the scene of some such extraordinary baptismal regenerations as are recorded by the Saxon historians in honor of Paulinus or Augustine.

The bounty of the founder, as might have been expected, was dealt out with no niggard or parsimonious hand. He bestowed not in high sounding legal words, like many that might be quoted, lands by the mile, that still furnish only sustenance to wild birds and amusement to the sportsman; but, heeding, as it would seem, the admonition of St. Augustine-" With what face canst thou expect an inheritance from Christ in heaven, that defraudest Christ in thy inheritance, here on earth?"-he bestowed upon his Priory these most munificent gifts-two parts of the tithes of Bolton in Northumberland-the town and church of Carham-uponTweed-the church of Garton, with more than a hundred acres of land in a place called St. Michael's Flat-the church of Helmsley Blackmore, with a like quantity of land, and pannage in the great oak woods there for their swine and pasturage of cattle the church of Hilton-two parts of the tithes of the mill of Helton in Northumberland-the tithes of all the farms at Howsham-the church of Kirkby Grendale-the tithes of his demesne lands at Linton-the churches of Linton and of Rosseight hundred acres of land in Sixtendale-the manor of Titelington-the entire towns of Whitwell and Westow, together with an extensive and valuable right of fishing in the Derwent,

and the tithe of Howsham mill. He was, in fact, the first and last great benefactor to the Priory-for all the other charters to the house that I have seen, and I believe I have nearly seen them all, represent nothing more than dearly bought "confirmations" from the Crown, the Pope, or the Lords Paramount of Fees; or donations of mere scattered oxgangs, that it is useless to recapitulate.

After Espec's death his estates-still of immense value and extent were divided among his sisters, Hawise, Albreda, and Adeline. The eldest had married William de Bussy, a member of a very influential Yorkshire family at that time; the second, Nicholas de Traily, of whom little or nothing is known; and the youngest, Peter de Roos, who, subsequently and wisely, left his paternal estate of Roos, in Holderness, and became the founder of the great baronial family that built the castle of Helmsley, produced men that joined in wresting Magna Charter from King John, fought valiantly at the battle of Lincoln-in the wars of Gascony-against the Scots and the Welsh-at the battle of Evesham-shared in the glory of Cressy and Poictiers; and, at length, in the reign of Henry VII, 1508, (after having provided their country with such a succession of warriors as few families can display), left-through an alliance of the daughter of Lord Thomas de Roos, who shared so bitterly in the disaster of Towton field-their vast estates in the possession of Sir Robert Manners, ancestor to the present Duke of Rutland.

To Adeline, his youngest sister, Walter Espec especially committed and gave, as he had given also to his wife, the advowson or right of patronage to his monasteries of Kirkham and Rivaulx and within their now bare and roofless walls many of her descendants are now sleeping their last and dreamless sleep, unconscious that the coveted requiem that was to have been sung-for ever-above their gentle dust, is to be, fancifully, heard only in the murmuring of the passing stream, and the diapason of the winds that are toned through the ruins that mark their last earthly dwelling place.

Among the burial places of the family that are particularly recorded, we learn from a Chronicle or pedigree entered in the chartulary of Rivaulx abbey, which I have previously quoted, that William de Ross, who, even in his father's lifetime, was an active supporter of the baronial and popular cause against King Henry the Third, was buried in the church of Kirkham, before the high altar: that his son, Lord Robert de Ross, the redoubtable warrior, once rested there beneath a marble tomb, on the

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south side of the choir: that his son, Lord William, the sworn foe of Scotland, and a great benefactor to the house, had his grave and a marble tomb on the other side of the choir and (so affectionately did they cling to the place, when feudal ties might have withdrawn them, in death, elsewhere) his son William, the third baron, another noted soldier, chose also his grave and had a marble tomb here, by the side of his grandfather.

Though the monks might have read that-"Monuments at last memorials need"-they hardly would have believed that this little volume, which they must have often used familiarly, would ever become the sole record of honoured objects, whose site should one day be trodden in open air, by the beasts of the field.

Although the lot of the canons of Kirkham had been cast in a beautiful and pleasant place, so that-unlike the first poor brethren of Bolton, Sawley, Kirkstall, Jervaux and Bylandthey had no occasion to importune their patron to be delivered from an exile condition on barren or inclement moorlands-places, as chronicles say, of "horror and vast solitude," where, to use a modern phrase," a provisional" convent might be cheaply gratified in their intended exercise of asceticism-it would appear that, about a century after the period of the foundation, they meditated a surrender of their house and property to the monks of Rivaulx, and intended to establish themselves in the parish of Weaverthorpe, twelve miles east of Malton. The motive is no more apparent to us than that which induced the monks of Rivaulx to meditate a translation of their house in 1158-five years after the death of the founder-to "Stainton near the sea," midway between Whitby and Scarborough-a fact not generally known. The intentions of our canons, however, is indisputable; since the indenture or agreement between the monks of Rivaulx and the canons of Kirkham is entered, at length, in the Coucher book of the former house.

After a preamble which states that the concession was made "for the love of God, the health of their souls-for the sake of establishing a common feeling between the houses,--for the peace and honor of the prior, and at the wish and desire of their patron"-motives in which the last recited was doubtless the most operative and predominant-the record goes on to say, that the canons had, in consequence, granted to the house of Rivaulx the estate of Kirkham, with its priory and other edifices, their gardens, orchards, mills, and all other things there except one barn (of course of wood) which they wished to remove; likewise Whitwell and Westow, and upwards of four hundred acres

of land in Sixtendale, which the patron held in his own hand, together with another hundred acres of land and one hundred sheep.

In exchange for this was to be given to the canons not-mark -by the monks of Rivaulx-but by the common patron, Lord de Ross, (whom some people probably suspected looked upon sweet Kirkham's lawn as a kind of Naboth's vineyard, from his dreary moorland castle at Helmsley,) the whole of Linton and Weaverthorpe, with the appurtenances of the latter, free from all services whatever; the prior and his friends undertaking to build a sufficiently large church, a chapter-house, a dormitory, and a refectory, of stone, with other offices of another material, namely, an infirmary, a store-house, hospitium, bakehouse, stable, granary, and barn; also a good mill, if the same could be provided at a reasonable cost. The canons stipulated, also, that on their departure from Kirkham they should be allowed to take with them all their "mobilia," specifying not only their crosses, chalices, books, and vestments, but also their painted windows, which they would replace with white glass. They would leave, also, any one of the bells which might be selected. There is no date to this very singular document, but some internal evidence appears to refer it to an early period in the 13th century. We may, therefore, suppose that, on the abandonment of the project, the canons began the reconstruction of their choir and chapterhouse-works which must once have worthily held a high place amongst the architectural triumphs of Yorkshire.

Beyond transactions with reference to their estates or privileges, there is nothing more worthy of mention (on an occasion like the present) in the quiet and monotonous history of the Priory, until the time of its dissolution; unless-as an illustration of mediæval marvels-I may be allowed to report a story told by St. Bernard in the life of his friend Malachy, archbishop of Armagh, in Ireland, which occurred when he came to York, on his passage to Rome.

He says but remember that he is speaking to you after a lapse of seven hundred years-"In the town of York, there came to wait upon him a man of noble parentage, William, Prior of the Brothers Regular at KIRKHAM-now a monk and abbot of our Order at Melrose-who, humbly and devoutly, recommended himself to Malachy's prayers. Seeing that the bishop had many in his company and but few horses to carry them, he offered him his own, only adding that he was sorry that it had been bred a draught horse, and that its paces were somewhat rough.

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