Persons fired with religious enthusiasm sometimes forget to have a due regard for the minor requirements of the law. This is exactly what the pious monk from Meaux Abbey did: he endowed his hermitage with certain property from the profits of which he and his successors could support themselves, but he quite forgot to get the king’s licence for such a gift, which was, of course, a gift in mortmain. Now all this happened in the closing years of Richard II’s luckless reign, and so much were the crown officers busied in other and weightier matters, that no one ever found out what a terrible thing Brother Matthew had done till Henry of Lancaster had been proclaimed king. A heavy pecuniary fine might have been the result of the monk’s hastiness, but for this fortunate circumstance. By an odd coincidence, Henry’s landing in England had taken place in the Humber close to the new hermitage which, small and mean though it was, gave him a comfortable shelter for the night. When the affair came to be looked into, this was remembered, and Brother Matthew was not only speedily forgiven, but he and his successors had bestowed upon them the important privilege of the right to take any wreck cast upon the shore within two leagues of the hermitage. The monk’s successor was a certain Brother Richard Redbarrow, and a very good and charitable man he seems to have been: the constant wrecks around him, though they yielded him considerable profit, made his heart bleed for those who lost their lives by shipwreck. The possession of a full bag of treasure, or a cask of dainty wine, was no compensation for the sorrow which would fill his heart when the gray morning revealed a dozen or more lifeless bodies stretched upon the beach, and he determined to do what he could to prevent or lessen shipwreck, and beside his hermitage he set to work to build a lighthouse. Had Brother Richard possessed money enough to finish what he began, we might never have known of his Christian work; but he had not, and in the year 1427 he petitioned Parliament to obtain from the king the grant of a small toll on the shipping entering or leaving the port of Hull towards finishing his ‘beken’ tower; the cost of the light upon it he was ready to bear. Parliament thought it an excellent plan, and so did the king. Brother Richard got his grant, and no doubt the lighthouse was built and did good service for many a year to come. But in time the sea encroached, acre by acre, till hermitage and lighthouse both disappeared, and in the general survey of monastic property taken at the dissolution, we find no mention of either one or the other.