bot, but did not actively
govern it. In 1539 its downfall came, and it surrendered to King Henry
VIII. The deed of surrender, signed by thirty-nine monks, is still
preserved, and the seal is in the British Museum. The abbey is now in
ruins; the church and gateway remain, but the great group of buildings
that composed it has mostly disappeared, so that the old monastery is
almost as completely effaced as Verulam. But the church, by being bought
for $2000 for the St. Albans parish church, is still preserved, and is
one of the most interesting ecclesiastical structures in England; yet
its great length and massive central tower are rather unfavorable to its
picturesqueness, though the tower when seen from a distance impresses by
its grandeur and simplicity. In this tower, as well as in other parts of
the church, can be detected the ancient bricks from Verulam. The
ground-plan of St. Albans Church is a Latin cross, and it is five
hundred and forty-eight feet long. The western part was erected in the
twelfth, and the greater portion of the nave and choir in the thirteenth
century. The floor of the choir is almost paved with sepulchral slabs,
though of the two hundred monuments the church once contained barely a
dozen remain. At the back of the high altar was the great treasury of
the abbey, the shrine enclosing St. Alban's relics, but this was
destroyed at the Reformation: some fragments have been since discovered,
and the shrine thus reproduced with tolerable completeness. On the side
of the chapel is a wooden gallery, with cupboards beneath and a
staircase leading up to it. In the shrine and cupboards were the abbey
treasures, and in the gallery the monks kept watch at night lest they
should be despoiled. This vigilance, we are told, was necessary, for
rival abbeys were by no means scrupulous about the means by which they
augmented their stores of relics. This quaint gallery, still preserved,
is five hundred years old. Near the shrine is the tomb of Duke Humphrey
of Gloucester, brother of King Henry V. and regent during the minority
of Henry VI., who was assassinated at Windsor. The tomb was opened in
1703, and the skeleton found buried among spices and enclosed in two
coffins, the outer of lead. The vault remained opened, and visitors
purloined good Humphrey's bones till nearly all had disappeared, when
the authorities concluded it was better to close up the vault and save
what remained. The massive gatehouse, which still ex