eir foolish pleasure, hewed off his head; and Launcelot
Young, master glazier to Queen Elizabeth, feeling a sweet savour to come
from thence, and seeing the same dried from moisture, and yet the form
remaining with the hair of the head and beard red, brought it to London,
to his house in Wood Street, where for a time he kept it for the
sweetness, but in the end caused the sexton of that church to bury it
amongst other bones taken out of their charnel."

"The parish church of St. Michael, in Wood Street, is a proper thing,"
says Strype, "and lately well repaired; John Iue, parson of this church,
John Forster, goldsmith, and Peter Fikelden, taylor, gave two messuages
and shops, in the same parish and street, and in Ladle Lane, to the
reparation of the church, the 16th of Richard II. In the year 1627 the
parishioners made a new door to this church into Wood Street, where till
then it had only one door, standing in Huggin Lane."

St. Mary Staining, in Wood Street, destroyed by the Great Fire, stood on
the north side of Oat Lane, in the Ward of Aldersgate Within. "The
additional epithet of _staining_," says Maitland, "is as uncertain as
the time of the foundation; some imagining it to be derived from the
painters' stainers, who probably lived near it; and others from its
being built with stone, to distinguish it from those in the City that
were built with wood. The advowson of the rectory anciently belonged to
the Prioress and Convent of Clerkenwell, in whom it continued till their
suppression by Henry VIII., when it came to the Crown. The parish, as
previously observed, is now united to St. Michael's, Wood Street. That
this church is not of a modern foundation, is manifest from John de
Lukenore's being rector thereof before the year 1328."

St. Alban's, Wood Street, in the time of Paul, the fourteenth Abbot of
St. Alban's, belonged to the Verulam monastery, but in 1077 the abbot
exchanged the right of presentation to this church for the patronage of
one belonging to the Abbot of Westminster. Matthew Paris says that this
Wood Street Church was the chapel of King Offa, the founder of St.
Alban's Abbey, who had a palace near it. Stow says it was of great
antiquity, and that Roman bricks were visible here and there among the
stones. Maitland thinks it probable that it was one of the first
churches built by Alfred in London after he had driven out the Danes.
The right of presentation to the church was originally possessed by th