What processions, triumphal or funereal, have passed along Mercery Lane and crossed the little open space before the gateway to the Precincts! Two French kings, and nearly every English sovereign till Queen Anne, have been here. Louis VII of France as a pilgrim, John of France as the captive of the Black Prince, Henry II on his bitter pilgrimage of penance in 1174; Richard Coeur de Lion with his captive, William the Lion of Scotland, in 1189; Henry III with the Magna Carta Archbishop Stephen Langton at the Great Pardon of 1220. Here before the Cathedral gate halted for a moment the weeping cavalcade when they buried the Black Prince, in 1376-- "To the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation, Mourning when its leaders fall". No man bearing weapons was admitted to the Precincts after the murder of Becket; therefore the two emblematic riders who had accompanied the bier from Westgate, "one bearing the Prince's arms of England and France, the other the ostrich feathers--one to represent the Prince in his splendid suite as he rode in war, the other to represent him in black as he rode to tournaments"--had here to fall out of rank. Here were borne to their grave Henry IV and his Queen Joan of Navarre. Dean Stanley remarks that Henry IV as a child of ten was perhaps present as a mourner at the Black Prince's funeral, unknowing that he should overthrow the Prince's son Richard II and finally rest by the famous warrior's side. The devout but incapable and unfortunate Henry VI was at Canterbury eleven times, and more than once as a pilgrim. As a pilgrim, in humblest guise, he was here after his final defeat at Tewkesbury, his Queen in captivity, his son dead on the field "stabbed by the Yorkist Lords after Edward (the Fourth) had met his cry for mercy with a buffet from his gauntlet". Henry himself went hence to die in the Tower, and so end the hopes of the House of Lancaster. The little open space between Mercery Lane and the Precincts gatehouse has seen many strange doings which we cannot record. In the thirteenth century Canterbury was requisitioned for a contingent of Edward I's Welsh invasion, and the monks refused to bear their share of the expense. This led to a furious dispute with the citizens, an embittered kind of "Town and Gown". A trench was dug before the gate to prevent ingress and egress of men or victuals, and the brethren appear to have been starved out. In the fifteenth century Edward IV hanged the Mayor and some of his friends here for complicity in treason.