of his only son,
Jesus Christ.'

So she made her gentlewomen bare her neck and bind her eyes and kneeling
down laid her head upon the block, and while she was saying, 'Lord, into
Thy hands I commend my spirit,' the axe fell and she was dead.

She lies buried before the altar of St. Peter's Church, near the bodies
of the Queens Anne Boleyn and Katharine Howard.

So she died, this poor innocent child of whom all we know is that she
was so scholarly that she could read Greek in the original: that she
was beautiful: of a grave and sweet disposition: and raised far above
the voice of calumny. She had, says Foxe, 'the innocency of childhood,
the beauty of youth, the gravity of age: she had the birth of a
princess, the learning of a clerk, the life of a saint, and the death of
a malefactor for her parents' offences.'

[Illustration: A BED IN THE REIGN OF HENRY III.]

19. THE PILGRIMS.

In the time when the road connecting village with village and town with
town was but an uncertain bridle path through woods and over waste
places, where in winter horse, man, and wayfarer struggled with bog and
quagmire, where robbers lurked in the thickets, and fevers and agues
haunted the marsh, where men went armed and every stranger was a foe: it
would seem as if most men stayed where they were born and desired not to
court the dangers of the unknown world. In many villages, especially in
the remote places of the country, this was the case. The men of Somerset
abode where they were born, speaking their own language, a race apart:
the men of Norfolk abode in their county cut off from the rest of the
world by fens in the west and sea on the north and east: their language
was not understood by the men of the west or the south country. Had the
other conditions of life allowed this isolation to continue
undisturbed, the nation could never have been created: we should have
remained a scattered collection of tribes speaking each its own language
and developing its own customs.

There were three causes which stirred the stagnant waters. The first was
War. The Baron, or Feudal Lord, carried off the young men of the village
to fight: those of them who returned had things to tell of the outside
world. They fired the imagination and awakened the enterprise of the
lads. The second was Trade at the trading ports: the lads saw, and
continued to talk with, the foreign sailors--the Fleming, the German,
the man of Rouen or Bordeaux: some of th