Our neighbours, the Danes, when they piratically infested this country and plundered and burnt so large a number of churches, were sometimes caught _in flagrante delicto_, and their sacrilegious crimes were punished by flaying--their skins being nailed on church doors, as a terror to all other evil doers. The late Dr. Prattinton, of Bewdley, in his Manuscripts now in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries, states that some old doors then in the crypt of Worcester Cathedral were covered with fragments of human skin said to have belonged to a man who had stolen the sanctus-bell from the high altar. Portions of this skin have been since examined microscopically by Mr. Quekett, of the Museum of the College of Surgeons, and pronounced decidedly to be human. I have myself examined some old doors in the crypt and found on them patches of a substance like leather, of which I have a specimen now in my possession; but if it ever belonged to a Dane it affords substantial proof that they could not have been a thin-skinned race. Similar specimens have been discovered at Westminster Abbey, and the churches of Hadstock and Copford, Essex; and Pepys, in his Diary (1661) mentions having seen Danes' skins on the great doors of Rochester Cathedral. Evesham Abbey is said to have derived its origin from the same means which have been assigned to many other religious establishments--namely, supernatural interposition. Eoves, a swineherd, was attending his pigs in the forest on the site of which Evesham now stands, when the Virgin appeared to him in a vision, which he communicated to his master, the Bishop of Worcester. The Bishop repaired to the place, and saw a repetition of the vision, the Virgin enjoining him not only to erect a monastery on that spot but to prepare an image of herself, which was to be worshipped at Worcester. This prelate, in atonement for the sins of himself and the people, bound himself with chains, locked them together, and threw the key into the Avon, declaring that nothing but Divine interposition should loose his chains. Then he undertook a pilgrimage to Rome, where his servant, purchasing a fish for dinner, found in it the key which had been thrown away; and so they returned triumphantly to Evesham. St. Kenelm's chapel, on the Clent Hill, near Stourbridge, has also its legend. Kenulph, King of Mercia, who died in 819, left his young son Kenelm under the protection of his sister Quendreda, who, however, being ambitious for the throne, procured her lover, Askobert, to take the youth out hunting, and there, in a secluded valley, he cut off his head, and buried him. However, a dove dropped a scroll on the high altar at Rome, whereon was written a couplet giving information of the murder: "In Clent Coubath, Kenelm, kinbarne, Ly'th under thorne, heaued bereaved."