Affairs at the monastery of Westminster were not improved after these events. There was much quarrelling among the monks. Walter of Wenlock died. There were disputes as to his succession; an unsatisfactory appointment was made, and there was a considerable amount of strife for a generation. The feeling against the king was shown equally against his son, and is reflected in the bitter Westminster chronicle of the reign of Edward II. One result of the demonstration of the futility of storing valuables within the precincts of the abbey was that the chief treasury of the wardrobe was bodily transferred to the Tower of London. Some obvious morals might be drawn from this slight but not unpicturesque story; but I will forbear from printing them. One generalisation I will, however, venture to make by way of conclusion. The strongest impression left by the records of the trial is one of the slackness and the easy-going ways of the mediaeval man. The middle ages do not often receive fair treatment. Some are, perhaps, too apt to idealise them, as an age of heroic piety, with its statesmen, saints, heroes, artists, and thinkers; but such people are in all ages the brilliant exceptions. The age of St. Francis of Assisi, of Dante, of Edward I, of St. Louis of France, of St. Thomas Aquinas, the age in which the greatest buildings of the world were made, was a great time and had its great men. But the middle ages were a period of strange contrasts. Shining virtues and gross vices stood side by side. The contrasts between the clearly cut black and white of the thirteenth century are attractive to us immersed in the continuous grey of our own times. But we find our best analogies to mediaeval conditions in those which are nowadays stigmatised as Oriental. Conspicuous among them was a deep pervading shiftlessness and casualness. Mediaeval man was never up to time. He seldom kept his promise, not through malice, but because he never did to-day what could be put off till to-morrow or the next day. Pudlicott then is a typical mediaeval criminal. He was doubtless a scamp, but most of the people with whom he had dealings were loose-thinking, easy-going folk like himself. Of course there are always the exceptions. But Edward I, with his gift of persistence, was a peculiarly exceptional type in the middle ages, and even Edward I found it convenient to let things slide in small matters. Thus on this occasion Edward began his investigation with great show of care and determination to sift the whole matter; but when he found that thorny problems were being stirred up, he determined—not for the first time—to let sleeping dogs lie, and avoid further scandal.