When order returned, and a strong King made it possible for men to live without the weapons of war at hand, the mind of the people, always a profoundly religious people, turned again to the realities of the unseen world. Once more there awakened the sense of change and decay and the worthlessness of things fleeting. The Court Jesters—converted—founded hospitals; the City Fathers handed over the lands of the City to the newly founded House of the Holy Trinity. Monasteries, nunneries, and colleges sprang up everywhere. The new foundations satisfied the people for another hundred years or so. Then they woke up once more in the old way. The religious life, they discovered, is not always found in the Religious House; the hood does not make the monk. The Friars came over to the country; they showed the people a new kind of religious life; one not separated from the world, but moving and living in the world; one that saves the soul by losing it and mounts to Heaven by the prayers and gratitude of men and women whom it has lifted from the mire and slough of sin and disease and misery. No more noble form of Christianity can be presented. Francis discovered the very mind of the Founder. For a hundred years and more the Friars kept alive the new religion. This fell off; but their early teaching survived, and was the foundation of Lollardy. When the Religious Houses were suppressed, the people of London looked on without a protest; their work was done; the City was again waking up to a new enthusiasm. The Reformation, the many sects of the new Faith, the fanaticism of the seventeenth century, the enthusiasm of the eighteenth, the Evangelical domination, the return of High Church doctrine, the development of Ritual, all these things are but manifestations of the same spirit which caused the Revival under Henry the Fourth and the Puritanism of the Civil Wars. Many changes pass over the face of London, but deep down lies, unchanged, the ancient spirit of religion. [Illustration: CHANTRY CHAPEL OF HENRY V. IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY From Grangerised Edition of Brayley’s _London and Middlesex_ in Guildhall Library.] In the Parish Church, generally a small building erected by some citizen who got a bit of the City carved out for his parish, there was little splendour. Every day mass was said in the morning, and vespers in the evening, by the Parish Priest: every morning the Chantry priests before the side altars sang mass for the souls of their founders. On All Souls’ Day the Parish Priest sang mass for the souls of all Christian men and women. There was many a poor faithful woman who could not find the money to pay for a Chantry or an obit, or an Annual, for the soul of her husband or her son—though well she knew, poor creature, how much he wanted that assistance. But she took comfort in the thought that so long as the world should last that yearly mass would be said for the benefit of all poor souls in pain.