When our burglary took place, king, court, and government offices had been removed to York for over five years. Under mediaeval conditions the eye of a vigilant task-master was an essential condition of efficiency. It followed then that during Edward’s long absence things at Westminster were allowed to drift into an extraordinary state of confusion and disorder. Affairs were made worse by the fact that even kings were not always free to choose their own servants. Thus the king’s palace at Westminster was in the hands of an hereditary keeper. There was nothing strange about this. In the middle ages such offices were frequently held by hereditary right, just as in the East everybody takes up his father’s business as a matter of religious duty. Earl Curzon once pointed out to the electors of Oldham that in India there are still hereditary tailors, who did their work very well. However this may be with tailors in the East and legislators in the West, the hereditary keeper of Edward’s palace of Westminster did not prove to be a very effective custodian of his master’s property. His name was John Shenche or Senche, and he held two hereditary offices, that of “keeper of the king’s palace at Westminster,” and also the keepership of the Fleet prison, in right of his wife Joan, who had inherited both from her father. Thus in addition to the keepership of the palace John Shenche “kept” the king’s prison of the Fleet in the city of London. As a rule, John and his wife Joan had their habitation in the prison in the City. John, therefore, employed as his deputy at Westminster an underling, a certain William of the Palace, who kept, or rather did not keep, for him the king’s palace at Westminster. However, early in the year 1303, John left his abode in the City where his wife remained, and took up his quarters in the palace. Apparently the prison was not so comfortable a place for an easy-going officer to live in as the palace. Perhaps, too, the domestic restraints imposed upon Shenche in the city were burdensome to him. Certainly gay times now ensued in the deserted palace. Soon John and William, in the absence of the higher authorities, seem to have gathered together a band of disreputable boon companions of both sexes, whose drunken revels and scandalous misconduct were soon notorious throughout the neighbourhood. One element in this band of revellers was, I regret to say, a certain section of the monks of the neighbouring monastery. For as the absence of the king and the court had left the palace asleep, as it were, so also had the monastery at Westminster sunk into a deeper and more scandalous slumber.