I wish first of all to explain the meaning of the sentence, rather cryptic to the generality, in which I spoke of my burglary as that of the robbery of the treasury of the king’s wardrobe within Westminster Abbey. For this purpose I must ask you to carry your minds back to the Westminster of the early years of the fourteenth century. Westminster was then what Kensington was in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, a court suburb, aloof from the traffic and business of the great city of London. Now the twin centres of Westminster were the king’s palace and the adjacent Benedictine Abbey. The rough plan, which I am permitted to print on the opposite page, will show the close relation of the two great groups of buildings. It was much closer in many ways than the relations between the Houses of Parliament, the modern representative of the old palace, and the present abbey buildings. If these latter largely remain, despite many destructive alterations in details, in their ancient site, we must remember that there was nothing like the broad modern road that separates the east end of the abbey from Westminster Hall and the House of Lords. A wall enclosed the royal precincts, and went westwards to within a few feet of the monks’ infirmary and the end of St. Margaret’s Church. The still existing access to the abbey on the east side of the south transept through the door by which you can still go into “poet’s corner,” having the chapter house on your left and Henry VII’s chapel on your right, was the portal by which immediate access to the palace could be gained through a gate in this wall. The space between the abbey and the palace wall was occupied by the churchyard of St. Margaret’s. The parish church—or rather its successor—still crouches beneath the shade of the neighbouring minster. This churchyard covered the ground now taken up by Henry VII’s chapel, which of course was not as yet in existence. In the midst of this grassy plot stood the chapter house of the monks of Westminster, with its flying buttresses and its single pillar supporting its huge vault, then newly erected by the pious zeal of Henry III. [Illustration: Plan of Westminster Abbey and Palace.]