s to be presented unto the Ordenary, to be
tried, and punished.

"_Item._ The poore within the precincte shalbe provyded for by the
inhabitantes of the same.

"_Item._ In tyme of plague, good order shalbe taken for the restrainte
of the same.

"_Item._ Lanterne and light to be mainteined duringe winter time."

All traces of its former condition have long since disappeared from
Whitefriars, and it is difficult indeed to believe that the dull,
uninteresting region that now lies between Fleet Street and the Thames
was once the riotous Alsatia of Scott and Shadwell.

And now we come to Bridewell, first a palace, then a prison. The old
palace of Bridewell (Bridget's Well) was rebuilt upon the site of the
old Tower of Montfiquet (a soldier of the Conqueror's) by Henry VIII.,
for the reception of Charles V. of France in 1522. There had been a
Roman fortification in the same place, and a palace both of the Saxon
and Norman kings. Henry I. partly rebuilt the palace; and in 1847 a
vault with Norman billet moulding was discovered in excavating the site
of a public-house in Bride Lane. It remained neglected till Cardinal
Wolsey (_circa_ 1512) came in pomp to live here. Here, in 1525, when
Henry's affection for Anne Boleyn was growing, he made her father
(Thomas Boleyn, Treasurer of the King's House) Viscount Rochforde. A
letter of Wolsey's, June 6, 1513, to the Lord Admiral, is dated from "my
poor house at Bridewell;" and from 1515 to 1521 no less than L21,924 was
paid in repairs. Another letter from Wolsey, at Bridewell, mentions that
the house of the Lord Prior of St. John's Hospital, at Bridewell, had
been granted by the king for a record office. The palace must have been
detestable enough to the monks, for it was to his palace of Bridewell
that Henry VIII. summoned the abbots and other heads of religious
societies, and succeeded in squeezing out of them L100,000, the
contumacious Cistercians alone yielding up L33,000.

It was at the palace at Bridewell (in 1528) that King Henry VIII. first
disclosed the scruples that, after his acquaintance with Anne Boleyn,
troubled his sensitive conscience as to his marriage with Katherine of
Arragon. "A few days later," says Lingard, condensing the old
chronicles, "the king undertook to silence the murmurs of the people,
and summoned to his residence in the Bridewell the members of the
Council, the lords of his Court, and the mayor, aldermen, and principal
citizens. Before them he enu