The fate of the incriminated clerks still hung in the balance when in the spring of 1305 Edward came back in triumph to London, rejoicing that at last he had effected the thorough conquest of Scotland. His cheerful frame of mind made him listen readily to the demands of the monks of Westminster to have pity on their unfortunate brethren, and to comply with the more general clerical desire that ecclesiastical privilege should be respected. Only a few months after the burglary, the news of the outrage on pope Boniface VIII at Anagni had filled all Christendom with horror. At the instance of Philip the Fair, king of France, and his agents in Italy the pope was seized, maltreated, and insulted. In the indignant words of Dante, “Christ was again crucified in the person of his vicar”. The universal feeling of resentment against so wanton a violation of ecclesiastical privilege was ingeniously used in favour of the monks of Westminster. Among the monks, arrested at first, but soon released with the majority of their brethren, were two men who had some reputation as historians. One of these was magnanimous enough to write, two or three years afterwards, a sort of funeral eulogy of Edward, but the other, Robert of Reading, who, in my opinion, kept the official chronicle of the abbey from 1302 to 1326, set forth the Westminster point of view very effectively in the well-known version of the chronicle called _Flores Historiarum_, the original manuscript of which is now in the Chetham Library. In this is given what may be regarded as the official account of Richard’s burglary. The robbery of the king of England was a crime only comparable to the robbery of the treasure of Boniface VIII, six months later at Anagni. The chronicler is most indignant at the suggestion that the monks had anything to do with the matter, and laments passionately their long imprisonment and their unmerited sufferings. He relies in substance on the story as told in Pudlicott’s confession. The burglary was effected by a single robber. So lacking in humour was the Westminster annalist that he did not scruple to borrow the phraseology and the copious Scriptural citations of a certain “Passion of the monks of Westminster according to John,” the whole text of which is unfortunately not extant. I may say, however, that the species of composition called a “Passion” was particularly in vogue at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and is mainly characterised by its extraordinary skill in parodying the words of the Scripture in order to describe in mock heroic vein some incident of more or less undeserved suffering. For profanity, grim humour, and misapplied knowledge of the Vulgate the “passions” of this period have no equal. They are a curious illustration of the profane humour of the mediaeval ecclesiastic in his lighter moments.