The result of the reference above ordered to the Barons of the Exchequer &c. was unfavourable to the claim of the City, the Charter of the Hospital was again confirmed. The question of the Tolls was not indeed finally disposed of; but as it sleeps for a century or so, we must not now depart from the course of our record—see 1445. 1305. Another and special incident arose at the fair of this year. I will quote the eloquent description of Mr. Morley. On the eve of St. Bartholomew, the first day of the fair in the year 1305, the traders and pleasure-seekers, the friars and the jesters, clothiers, tumblers, walkers upon stilts, hurried across the grass of Smithfield from the side on which the fair was being held, to the Gallows under the Elms, where officers of state and a great concourse of men awaited a most welcome spectacle. The priory was indeed built on the site of the gallows; but in that suburban gathering-place of the people—place of executions, place of tournaments, place of markets, place of daily sport, place of the great annual fair—one gallows-tree was not enough to satisfy a justice that loved vengeance and had slight regard for life. Under the Elms of which already mention has been made (Cow Lane now represents their site)—under the Elms we read in a close roll, so early as the fourth year of Henry III., gallows were built “where they had stood before.” An execution during fair time on that ancient exhibition ground, was entertainment rarely furnished to the public: for the Church forbade, among other work, fulfilment of the sentence of the law on any holiday of festival; _and a fair was a Saint’s Holiday_. But on this occasion, law was eager to assure the execution of its vengeance. The redoubtable Wallace, hero of the Scottish people, had been taken. The rugged patriot, strong of heart and strong of hand, had been brought to London in his chains the day before the fair was opened, and on the day of the opening of the fair was arraigned and condemned at Westminster as a traitor, and without even a day’s respite, at once sent on to his death. Under the Elms, therefore, in Smithfield, stood all the concourse of Bartholomew fair, when William Wallace was dragged thither in chains at the tails of horses, bruised, bleeding, and polluted with the filth of London. The days had not yet come when that first part of the barbarous sentence on high treason was softened by the placing of a hurdle between the condemned man and the mud and flint over which he was dragged. Trade in the fair was forgotten while the patriot was hanged, but not to death; cut down, yet breathing, and disembowelled, mummers and merchants saw the bowels burnt before the dying hero’s face, then saw the executioner strike off his head, quarter his body, and dispatch from the ground five basket-loads of quivering flesh, destined for London, Berwick, Newcastle, Aberdeen and Perth. Then, all being over, the stilt-walkers strode back across the field,