grass and flowers. Against the wall are ranged the tombstones of the obscure Forgotten. I suppose it makes very little difference to a man whether he has a headstone provided for him against the wall of a public garden, or a tablet-nay, a monument-against the wall of St. Margaret's Church, as soon as he is properly and completely forgotten.

St. Margaret's, then, is the only church of which one

MEDAL WORN BY THE CAPTAIN OF THE GREY COAT BOYS

thinks in connection with Westminster. There is one scene, one little drama, enacted or partly enacted in this church, which perhaps may belong to the pen of the layman. It is the famous case brought before a Court of Chivalry in the year 1387 to decide the dispute between Sir Richard le Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor respecting the right of either party to a certain coat-of-arms. This was no common case it was the alleged violation of a family possession, a

family distinction. The case was considered so important that more than three hundred witnesses were called. They are nearly all shadows and empty names now; but one there is who stands out prominent: his name is Geoffrey Chaucer.

The following is the evidence given by the poet in this great heraldic case :

'Geoffrey Chaucer, Esquire, forty years of age and more, having borne arms for twenty-eight years, produced for the side of Sir Richard le Scrope, sworn and examined. Asked if the arms Azure with a bend Or belonged or ought to belong to the said Richard of right and inheritance, said, "Yes"; for

he had seen him thus armed in France before the city of Retters, and Sir Henry le Scrope with the same arms with a white label and a banner, and the said Sir Richard with the complete arms-Azure and a bend Or; and thus had he seen them armed during the whole time that the said Geoffrey was

present. Asked why he knew that the said arms belonged to the said Sir Richard, said that he had heard speech of old knights and squires, and that they had always continued their possession of the said arms, and for all his time reputed for these arms in common fame and public ways. And also he said that he had seen the same arms on banners, on

windows, on paintings, on robes, commonly called the arms of Le Scrope. Asked if he had ever heard who was the first ancestor of the said Sir Richard, who first bore the said arms, said "No"; but that he had never heard of any, but that they had come of an old stock and of old gentlefolk, and had held the same arms. Asked if he had ever heard of any interruption or challenge made by Sir Robert Grosvenor, or by his ancestors, or by any one in his name, to the said Sir Richard or to any of his ancestors, said "No"; but that he was once in Friday Street in London, and as he went along the street he saw hanging out a new sign made of the said arms, and he asked what house was this that had hung out the arms of Scrope; and one other replied, and said, “Not so and they are not hung out for the arms of Scrope, nor painted for those arms, but they are painted and put up there for a knight of the County of Chester, a man named Robert Grosvenor'; and that this was the first time that ever he heard tell of Sir Robert Grosvenor or his ancestors or anybody bearing the name of Grosvenor.'

The case, at which between three and four hundred witnesses were heard, was finally decided by Thomas Fitz au Roy, Duc de Gloucestre, Counte de Bukyngham et Dessex, Constable Dengleterre,' who, after due care and deliberation, and the weighing of all the evidence, and consultation with wise and discreet persons, finally adjudged 'les dites armes d'azure ove une bend dor avoir esté et estre les armes du dit Richard Lescrop.' And so ended this great case, which somehow puts the poet before us more clearly than even his 'Canterbury Pilgrims.'

And so we come back to the streets proper of Westminster -i.e. the slums on the west and south of the Monastery.

There have always been slums here, even before the Sanctuary rabble and after. The streets lying about Tothill Lane, however, which were slums from the beginning, only began in the sixteenth century. The map of Anthony Van

den Wyngeerde (A.D. 1543) shows only a few houses standing round about the Sanctuary in the north-west corner of the enclosure; there is a crowd of houses between King Street and the river, and on the west there is nothing but open country that part of the City which contained the most

infamous dens and the vilest ruffians, which was called the 'Desert' of Westminster, lying to the south of Tothill Fields, grew up and ran to waste and seed in the course of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth we reaped the harvest of that seed; at the end of the nineteenth we are still pulling up the weeds and planting new flowers and sowing better seed.