s that I lived in Hathelsborough I spent
a great deal of time in this chamber--the then vicar of St. Lawrence,
Mr. Goodbody, allowed me to examine anything I found stored there--it
was amongst the muniments and registers of St. Lawrence, indeed, that I
discovered a great deal of valuable information about the history of the
town. Well, I have just said that this chamber, this middle section of
the tower, is panelled; it is panelled from the oak flooring to within
two feet of the oak beams in its ceiling, and the panelling, though it
is probably four hundred years old, is in an excellent state of
preservation. Now, about the middle of the last year that I spent in
this town, I began to be very puzzled about the connecting wall between
St. Lawrence tower and the Moot Hall. I saw no reason for making an arch
at that point, and the wall had certainly not been built as a support,
for the masonry of the tower and of the hall is unusually solid. I got
the idea that that wall had originally been built as a means of
communication between tower and hall; that it was hollow, and that there
at each extremity there was a secret means of entrance and exit. I knew
from experience that this sort of thing was common in Hathelsborough;
the older part of the town is a veritable rabbit-warren! There is
scarcely a house in the market-place, for instance, in which there is
not a double staircase, the inner one being very cleverly concealed, and
I know of several secret ways and passages, entered, say, on one side of
a street and terminating far off on another. There is a secret
underground way beneath the market-square which is entered at the
Barbican in the Castle and terminates in St. Faith's chapel in St.
Hathelswide's church; there is another, also underground, from St.
Matthias's Hospital to the God's House in Cripple Lane. There are
others--as I say, the old town is honeycombed. So there would be, of
course, nothing unusual or remarkable in the presence of a secret
passage between St. Lawrence tower and the Moot Hall. The only thing was
that there was no record of any such passage through the connecting
wall; no one had ever heard of it; and there were no signs of entrance
to it either in the tower or in the Moot Hall. However, I discovered
it--by careful and patient investigation of the panelling in the chamber
I have mentioned. The panelling is divided, on each wall of the chamber,
into seven compartments; the fourth compartment on the