They used to show an old house in Hart Lane, rich with carved wood, as Whittington's, but he must have lived in his own parish of St. Michael's Paternoster Royal, and, one is pretty certain, on the spot where was afterwards built his college, which stood on the north side of the church. Here he entertained Henry of Agincourt and Katherine, his bride, with a magnificence which astonished the king. But Whittington knew what he was doing; the banquet was not ostentation and display; its cost was far more than repaid by the respect for the wealth and power of the city which it nourished and maintained in the kingly mind. The memory of this and other such feasts, we may be very sure, had its after effect even upon those most masterful of sovereigns, Henry VIII. and Queen Bess. On this occasion it was nothing that the tables groaned with good things, and glittered with gold and silver plate; it was nothing that the fires were fed with cedar and perfumed wood. For this princely Mayor fed these fires after dinner with nothing less than the king's bonds to the amount of £60,000. In purchasing power that sum would now be represented by a million and a quarter. A truly royal gift. It was not given to many merchants, "sounding always the increase of their winning," thus to thrive and prosper. Most of them lived in more modest dwellings. All of them lived in comparative discomfort, according to modern ideas. When we read of mediæval magnificence we must remember that the standard of what we call comfort was much lower in most respects than at present. In the matter of furniture, for instance, though the house was splendid inside and out with carvings, coats of arms painted and gilt, there were but two or three beds in it, the servants sleeping on the floor; the bedrooms were small and dark; the tables were still laid on trestles, and removed when the meal was finished; there were benches where we have chairs; and for carpet they had rushes or mats of plaited straw; and though the tapestry was costly, the windows were draughty, and the doors ill-fitting. When, with the great commercial advance of the fourteenth century, space by the river became more valuable, the disposition of the Hall, with its little court, became necessarily modified. The house, which was warehouse as well as residence, ran up into several stories high--the earliest maps of London show many such houses beside Queenhithe, and in the busiest and most crowded parts of the City; on every story there was a wide door for the reception of bales and crates; a rope and pulley were fixed to a beam at the highest gable for hoisting and lowering the goods. The front of the house was finely ornamented with carved wood-work. One may still see such houses--streets full of them--in the ancient City of Hildesheim, near Hanover. [Illustration: CROSBY HALL]