pride. The bishop answered, "I trust not in
man, but in God alone, who will give me boldness to speak the truth." A
rumour was spread that John of Gaunt had threatened to drag the bishop
out of the church by the hair, and that he had vowed to abolish the
title of Lord Mayor. A tumult began. All through the City the billmen
and bowmen gathered. The Savoy, John of Gaunt's palace, would have been
burned but for the intercession of the bishop. A priest mistaken for
Percy was murdered. The duke fled to Kensington, and joined the Princess
of Wales.

Richard II., that dissolute, rash, and unfortunate monarch, once only
(alive) came to St. Paul's in great pomp, his robes hung with bells, and
afterwards feasted at the house of his favourite, Sir Nicholas Brember,
who was eventually put to death. The Lollards were now making way, and
Archbishop Courtenay had a great barefooted procession to St. Paul's to
hear a famous Carmelite preacher inveigh against the Wycliffe doctrines.
A Lollard, indeed, had the courage to nail to the doors of St. Paul's
twelve articles of the new creed denouncing the mischievous celibacy of
the clergy, transubstantiation, prayers for the dead, pilgrimages, and
other mistaken and idolatrous usages. When Henry Bolingbroke (not yet
crowned Henry IV.) came to St. Paul's to offer prayer for the
dethronement of his ill-fated cousin, Richard, he paused at the north
side of the altar to shed tears over the grave of his father, John of
Gaunt, interred early that very year in the Cathedral. Not long after
the shrunken body of the dead king, on its way to the Abbey, was exposed
in St. Paul's, to prove to the populace that Richard was not still
alive. Hardynge, in his chronicles (quoted by Milman), says that the
usurping king and his nobles spread--some seven, some nine--cloths of
gold on the bier of the murdered king.

Bishop Braybroke, in the reign of Edward IV., was strenuous in
denouncing ecclesiastical abuses. Edward III. himself had denounced the
resort of mechanics to the refectory, the personal vices of the priests,
and the pilfering of sacred vessels. He restored the communion-table,
and insisted on daily alms-giving. But Braybroke also condemned worse
abuses. He issued a prohibition at Paul's Cross against barbers shaving
on Sundays; he forbade the buying and selling in the Cathedral, the
flinging stones and shooting arrows at the pigeons and jackdaws nestling
in the walls of the church, and the playing a