But if in Sudbury the Church had retreated peaceably before Wyclif, it was not from any doubt of the deadly earnestness of the struggle that lay before her. Archbishop Chichele's accession to the primacy was the signal for the building of Lollards' Tower. Dr. Maitland has shown that the common name rests on a mere error, and that the Lollards' Tower which meets us so grimly in the pages of Foxe was really a western tower of St. Paul's. But, as in so many other instances, the popular voice showed a singular historical tact in its mistake; the tower which Chichele raised marked more than any other in the very date of its erection the new age of persecution on which England was to enter. From a gateway in the northern side of the Post-room worn stone steps lead up to a dungeon in which many a prisoner for the faith must have lain. The massive oaken door, the iron rings bolted into the wall, the one narrow window looking out over the river, tell their tale as well as the broken sentences scratched or carved around. Some are mere names; here and there some light-pated youngster paying for his night's uproar has carved his dice or his "Jesus kep me out of all il compane, Amen." But "Jesus est amor meus" is sacred, whether Lollard or Jesuit graved it in the lonely prison hours, and not less sacred the "Deo sit gratiarum actio" that marks perhaps the leap of a martyr's heart at the news of the near advent of his fiery deliverance. It is strange to think, as one winds once more down the stairs that such feet have trodden, how soon England answered to the challenge that Lollards' Tower flung out over the Thames. The white masonry had hardly grown grey under the buffetings of a hundred years ere Lollard was no longer a word of shame, and the reformation that Wyclif had begun sat enthroned within the walls of the chapel where he had battled for his life.