Advancing up this narrow lane, we leave, on the left, the site of THE DOMINICAN, OR BLACK, FRIARS, long since cleared of its buildings, and now converted into a wharf, warehouse, and excellent gardens. These friars established themselves here as early as 1222, and assumed as their founder Matilda, grand-daughter and co-heiress of Walter de Lasci, lord of Ludlow, and wife of Geoffrey de Joinville, of Vaucoulour. Edward IV., who, throughout the whole of his reign regarded Shrewsbury with much affection, selected this religious house as his occasional residence, and the place in which his Queen was delivered of her second and third sons, Richard Shrewsbury, (1473–4,) Duke of York, afterwards murdered in the Tower, and George Plantagenet, who died young. Many persons of distinguished rank, who fell in the battle of Shrewsbury, 1403, received interment here. On levelling the ground in 1823, the foundations of three spacious apartments, fragments of mullions and pillars, emblazoned tiles, several skeletons enclosed in rude stone coffins, and great quantities of bones, were disclosed to view. The site is now the property of the Corbets of Sundorne. The sloping ground rising above the site of this friary, and extending to the south and south-eastern wall of the town, where the Infirmary and other houses now stand, was, as we learn from a charter of Henry III., dated 1227, confirming the possessions of the Abbey of Shrewsbury, given by “divers citizens of Salopesbury” to the monks of that house “for the planting of a vineyard:”—a situation, according to the best writers on horticulture, eminently adapted to the cultivation of the vine. Arrived at the top of the Water-lane, we enter, on the left, a cathedral-like close, in the centre of which the venerable edifice of ST. MARY’S CHURCH [Picture: St. Mary’s Church] uprears its “heavenward spire.” This church, once collegiate, is said to owe its foundation to Edgar the Peaceable, (959 to 975,) who, at the suggestion of Archbishop Dunstan, placed in it a dean, seven prebends, and a parish priest, though there is every probability that the foundation was antecedent to his reign. In the Saxon times, it possessed a landed estate of about 1300 acres, which it continued to hold at the time of Domesday, but of which it was soon after deprived, by what means we have no power of ascertaining. At the dissolution of collegiate churches, 1 Edw. VI., the revenues, which consisted chiefly of tithes, amounted to £42; the greater portion of which was granted in 1550, by Edward VI., towards the endowment of the Free Schools.