workmanship is of inferior character, but by one of those happy touches of nature which can reach us across the dark gulf of the past, the sculptor recalls such an office of affection as Scott pictures Clare to have rendered to Marmion on the field of Flodden:

"Is it the hand of Clare," he said,

"Or injured Constance, bathes my head?"
Then, as remembrance rose,—

"Speak not to me of shrift or prayer!
I must redress her woes.

Short space, few words, are mine to spare;
Forgive and listen, gentle Clare!"-'

I cannot enter now even into a general account of the donations which were made to the inonastery. These are enumerated in Dr. Burton's Monasticon Eboracense, from a chartulary or register whose owner is not mentioned. Nearly all the original sealed charters have perished. A chestfull of them was blown up when St. Mary's tower at York was destroyed, on the 16th June, 1644; the greatest part of the rest may have shared a somewhat similar fate. Within the last seven years a boxfull of them, comprising the royal grants of franchise, with fine pendent seals, were advertised for sale by a bookseller at Bristol. They did not immediately find a purchaser, and I ceased to hope that they would find a resting place in Yorkshire. About two years ago, however, as I was conversing one day with the bookbinder of the British Museum on his method of restoring mutilated documents, he shewed me a charred mass of parchment and wax which appeared to defy even his extraordinary skill; it was all that a fire on the bookseller's premises had spared of his Byland charters.

Several of the manuscript books which belonged to the library here have been preserved, and four of them are fortunately in the British Museum. The Harleian MS. 3641, which was rescued by Harley from the hands of some ignorant persons in London, in the year 1716, is a beautiful folio copy-of the twelfth century, slightly deficient at the end-of William of Malmesbury's De Gestis Pontificum Anglorum, inscribed on the first page, "Liber Sanctæ Mariæ de Bellelanda." A similar inscription will be found on the dorse of the 112th folio of the Cotton MS. Julius, A. xi.-a collection, in small quarto, of several historical and biographical works, the titles of which will be found in the printed catalogue. It once belonged to Lord Burghley, and was given to the Cotton Library, in 1609, by Mr. Henry Savell. There is internal evidence that the Royal MS. 5

(1) Mon. Ebor., pp. 328-340.

E. xxii., an octavo volume containing eight treatises of Gregory Nazianzen, transcribed in the twelfth century, belonged to Byland; and the like with reference to the Royal MS. 8 F. xv., a quarto of equal antiquity, in which will be found eighty-three Epistles of St. Bernard, his Apologia de vitâ et moribus Religiosorum, and Petri Abelardi Hæresium Capitula. Among the collection of manuscripts formed by several members of the Savile family, and dispersed by sale in 1861, was a splendid vellum folio of the thirteenth century, inscribed on the top of the first leaf, "Liber Sancta Maria de Bellelanda." It contained Bede's Opusculum in Librum Actuum Apostolorum, with his Exposition of the Canonical Epistles of the Apostles St. James, St. Peter, St. John, and St. Jude. In the catalogue it is described as written "by an English scribe, with painted capitals, in the original oak boards, covered with ox-hide, having brass knobs to protect the hair."

At the time of the suppression of the lesser monasteries, the Abbey of Byland and its possessions and privileges were vested in the crown by the operation of the statute 27th Hen. 8, c. 28; but it was re-founded by the king, with some other houses, by letters patent, dated 30th January, 1536. The hopes of the monks, however, were revived only to be extinguished; for they surrendered the house and all its estates to Henry the Eighth, on the 30th of November, 1538. The deed of conveyance is still preserved in the Public Record Office, bearing the signatures of John Allanbridge the abbot and twenty-four of his brethren, but the seal is lost. The last abbot was living, and in the enjoyment of a pension of £50 per annum, in the year 1553.

When the house was dismantled, the king's commissioners obtained from it seven bells, 516 ounces of plate, and 100 fother of lead from the roofs and windows.1 The net annual rental of

its lands then amounted to £238 9s. 4d.2

The site of the abbey and many of the adjacent granges and demesne lands were sold by King Henry VIII.,3 on the 22nd September, 1540, to Sir William Pickering, of a family that had been connected with the service of the Earls of Northumberland, and resident at Oswaldkirk. He did not live to enjoy them long, for he died on the 20th of May, 1542; and when his son, another Sir William Pickering, died in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, he was childless, and his estates passed, by his sister,

(1) Harl. MSS., 604, fol. 106.

(3)

Val. Eccl., vol. 5, p. 93.

Rotul. Pat., 32 Hen. 8. p. 3.

(4) Ing. post mortem, 34 lien. 8. William, his son and heir, was then twenty-four years old.

into another family. The ruins and many of the lands have long been in the possession of the Stapyltons of Myton.

I will now speak of the Ruins of the Abbey.

Before it was delivered into the hands of its merciless spoilers, the church of Byland must unquestionably have ranked among the most elegant and admirable structures of Yorkshire. In amplitude of dimensions it stood in the first rank of conventual churches. In the scientific character and simple dignity of its design, and the harmonious distribution and detail of its component parts, it was exceeded by few or none of them. There is, indeed, an absence of florid decoration and surface ornament, arising in some measure from that Constitution of the Cistercian order which directed that their buildings should be of a modest, plain, and unambitious character; but there is obviously exhibited, throughout the whole of the work, such a profound application of geometrical principles, as to render even the fragments that remain one of the most valuable evidences we possess in investigating the first development of the Early English style. They will be found especially so, when the details are studied in connexion with some other Cistercian churches, subject therefore to a common restriction. I allude particularly to Jervaux, where the church was begun in or very soon after the year 1156, before this work was projected to Roche, where some of the work must have been in hand at the same time: and to the choir and lady-chapel of Fountains, which were begun after this church must have been completed. A comparison also with the original portions of the choir and transept of Ripon cathedral, erected by Roger, Archbishop of York, at a period between the years 1154 and 1181, will be extremely useful. I am sometimes inclined to think that the architect of Byland had some continental model in his eye; or, at the least, was well acquainted with the progress of architecture in France and Germany; and the supposition may seem the less improbable, when it is remembered that all the Cistercian abbots were bound to attend the chapter-general of their order held annually at Citeaux, in Burgundy, about thirty miles S.E. of Rheims; and had therefore continual opportunities of examining and discussing the merits of buildings of advanced and novel character.

The plan of the church-a plain Latin cross-presents three peculiarities which, so far as I have observed, do not occur in any other Cistercian house in the kingdom. In the first place, the nave is of an extreme length; in the second, the transept has had a western as well as eastern aisle; and in the third, the

choir has had a transverse aisle at its eastern extremity. The unusual work in the nave and transept has, perhaps, been introduced for the sake of attaining the greatest perfection of design of which their ground plan was capable. In the enlargement of the choir, there may have been a purpose of obtaining ample space for altars against the eastern wall. The necessity of occupying the choir as soon as practicable, no doubt, caused the builders to commence operations there, and, so far as we can judge, they proceeded according to the original plan, modifying some minor details, until they reached the west end of the nave, when they appear to have altered their first design for that façade. I am inclined to this conjecture by the difference we see in the treatment of the extremities-both externally and internally-of the north and south aisles. The southern, and as I suppose the older one, has a round-headed doorway flanked by three shafts with plain capitals, and is enclosed, inside, under an arch of similar shape. Then come the corbels of the Galilee roof, inserted at a much lower level than those in the main body and north wing of the façade, and above these is a round-headed window like those in the lateral walls of the aisles, but of less size. The buttress also which divides the end of the south aisle from the central compartment is wider than that at the opposite side, and is also somewhat differently detailed. Now, the door of the north aisle has a pointed arch, mouldings of the same date as the chief entrance to the nave, and there is no window above. It will also be observed that the string course which passes above the chief entrance is continued only across the north wing. In the interior, there is no string course over its doorway, but on the opposite side there is one, which, on account of its position with reference to the windows, cannot have been prolonged horizontally from the lateral walls, but which may have been intended to have been continued under the western tier of lights, in the original design. In the south-west corner of the south aisle, the nook shaft of the vaulting rises from a bracket above the string course of the window sills; in the opposite corner, the shaft rises from the floor.

It may escape the notice of a casual observer that the capitals of the shafts of the central doorway are pla n on the south side, and foliated on the north. In those of the entrance to the north aisle, the relative portions of the plain and enriched capitals are not only reversed but their abaci are also different. Also, that there are minute but definite indications of the pitch of the central gable and of the aisle roofs, and that the underside of the

wheel window has been packed in its bed with roofing tiles. Upon the whole, with reference to the design of this beautiful façade, it appears to me far less probable that it was prepared in or before the year 1177, when the monks retired from Stocking to this place, than that it was adopted when the rest of the church had been completed. At the earlier period, though a tier of lancet lights with dog-tooth mouldings surmounted by a wheel window might have been projected, I apprehend that a roundheaded doorway would have been introduced within a slight projection or porch, in the central compartment, and no such reduplication of the shafts of the arcade above would have appeared as adds gracefulness to the present structure. How the architect tre ited a gabled extremity at the earlier period may be seen in an extant engraving of the south end of the transept, now nearly destroyed.

There has been a Galilee porch attached to the west front of the nave, as shewn by the corbels for the support of its roof. It was in existence in the year 1426, when one Wm. Tirplady desired, in his will, to be buried in the Galilee of St. Mary's Abbey at Byland.

I have not been able to obtain access to the wheel window in the gable, but by measuring a corresponding space on the ground below, I find that it is not less than twenty-six feet in diameter, and therefore probably as large as any coeval specimen of its kind that is known. So far as I can observe, there have been no mullions or spokes connected with the portions of the lower half that remains. May it have been that the glass was enclosed in a wooden rim or frame like those of the lights of the choir, and that there were radiating spokes attached to it of the same material?

The nave has been two hundred feet in length and seventy feet in width, leaving a space of thirty-eight feet nine inches for the central part. Though the inner or main walls have perished, it is still possible, by a careful examination of the fragments which remain attached to the western wall, and a comparison of thei with the south-east angle of the transept, to acquire a tolerably accurate idea of its former appearance. Eleven windows in its still perfect north aisle, and the intervening vaulting shafts of the roof, suggest the idea that it was divided in length into twelve bays or compartments. The responds, at the west end, shew that each side was divided in height into three stages; an arcade, a triforium, and a clerestory.

The bases of all the pillars on each side of the nave are either