Let us begin with the word treasury. In the fourteenth century treasury meant simply a storehouse, or at its narrowest a storehouse of valuables. To us the “treasury” is the government department of finance, but under Edward I the state office of finance was the Exchequer, which, as we saw, was located normally at Westminster, but since 1298 at York. When at Westminster the Exchequer had a “treasury” or storehouse there also, yet in its absence it is not likely that it kept either valuables or money at Westminster. But side by side with the state office was the household office of finance, the Wardrobe, and, though the wardrobe office was itinerating with the king, it still kept a “treasury” or storehouse at Westminster, and this, for the sake of greater safety, had been placed for some years at least within the precincts of the abbey. From the monastic point of view, it was doubtless an inconvenience that nearness to the royal dwelling compelled them to offer their premises for the royal service. Accordingly, kings not infrequently made demands upon the abbey to use its buildings. Thus the chapter house became a frequent place for meetings of parliament, and at a later time it was used and continued to be used till the nineteenth century, for the storage of official records. In the same way Edward secured the crypt underneath the chapter house as one of the storehouses of his Wardrobe. When the crypt was first used for this purpose I do not know, but records show us that it was already in use in 1291, at which date it was newly paved. It was not the only storehouse of the Wardrobe. There was another “treasury of the wardrobe” in the Tower of London, but this was mainly used for bulky articles, arms and armour, cloth, furs, furniture, and the like. Most of what we should call treasure was deposited in the Westminster crypt, and we are fortunate in having still extant a list of the jewels preserved there in 1298, the time when the court began to establish itself for its five years’ sojourn in the north. In 1303 jewels and plate were still the chief treasures preserved there. Some money was there also, notably a store of “gold florins of Florence,” the only gold coins currently used in England at a time when the national mints limited themselves to the coinage of silver. But I do not think there could have been much money, for Edward’s needs were too pressing, his financial policy too much from hand to mouth, for the crypt at Westminster to be a hoard of coined money, like the famous Prussian _Kriegsschatz_ at Spandau, which, we now rejoice to learn, is becoming rapidly depleted. Whatever its contents, Edward estimated that their value was £100,000, a sum equivalent to a year’s revenue of the English state in ordinary times. Unluckily mediaeval statistics are largely mere guess-work. But the amount of the guess at least suggests the feeling that the value of the treasures stored in the crypt was very considerable.