from Highbury to Cripplegate: of John Carpenter, town clerk, who has given us the _Liber Albus_, and who founded a small charity which in time grew into the City of London School: of Sir John Niel, master of the hospital of St. Thomas Acon in Chepe, who proposed to found four new City schools: of William Byngham, who founded at Cambridge the small college called God’s House for twenty-four scholars, which afterwards developed into the illustrious and venerable College of Christ: of William Elsinge, who founded the Spital for a hundred poor men which afterwards became Sion College: of John Barnes, who left money to be lent to young men beginning in business: of Philip Malpas, who left the then large sum of £125 a year for the relief of poor prisoners, besides great benefactions to the poor, and a sum of money then yielding £25 a year for Preachers on the three Easter Holydays at St. Mary Spital. When we remember that a priest could then live on £6 a year—does that include his lodging?—the remuneration for three sermons seems generous indeed. Robert Large belongs to the latter half of the fifteenth century: he left a great sum of money in various bequests, including the very useful charity of a marriage _dot_ for poor Maids. There were others, but these may suffice. They sufficiently prove the wealth of the donors, because a man thinks first of his own children or nephews: when he has provided for them, and not till then, he may consider how best to dispose of the residue. They prove also what is known from other sources of information that the endowment of monastic houses had practically ceased. Whittington, it is true, founded a college, but the chief duty of the Fellows was to sing masses daily and for ever for the repose of his own soul and that of his wife. I know nothing that shows the decay of the old belief in monks and friars more clearly than the list of fourteenth and fifteenth century benefactions and endowments. “Let us have libraries for scholars, and almshouses for the aged poor,” says Whittington, and endowed them. “Let us have schools,” says Sevenoke, Carpenter, and Byngham, and they endow them. But for the rich monks of the Holy Trinity, St. Mary of Grace, of St. Albans, of St. Peter’s—nothing. [Illustration: _Grove and Boulton._ THE PORCH OF THE CHURCH OF ST. ALPHAGE, LONDON WALL, FORMERLY THE CHAPEL OF THE PRIORY OF ELSINGE SPITAL] Henry could not afford to quarrel either with the Church or with the City. He passed the statute _De comburendis haereticis_ and the Bishops began to light those baleful fires of Smithfield which, far more than wealth, far more than luxury, alienated the hearts of the people from the Church.