More interesting than all others among William’s gifts to the Abbey were his sword and his coronation robes, which, stripped of their gold and silver chains and amulets in the reign of Rufus, for centuries remained objects of the greatest curiosity. But the Abbey was long a-building, and twenty-eight years had flown since the battle and William himself had been seven years in his grave, before it was completed and finally consecrated. XLIV And then it stood in this noble situation for well over four hundred and fifty years, growing in architectural splendour and worldly wealth, but decaying in religious life and morals, in common with all other monasteries. Its income was equal to £10,000 per annum of our money: the Abbot entertained guests of the noblest, and the brethren’s indiscriminate charity made Battle a centre for all the “mighty beggaris, sturdye vagrantes, idle mychers, and foule cozeners” in Sussex. It was rotten-ripe and full fit to be plucked when Henry the Eighth ended the monasteries and when his Commissioners appeared before its doors on May 27th, 1538. To sentimentalise over the suppression of places like Battle Abbey would be excusable in the ignorant; in those fully informed it would be criminal. It cannot be too often repeated that the work undertaken by Henry the Eighth was no mere capricious act of tyranny, was no unwarrantable or unprovoked attack upon the religious houses. Wyclif had long before, at the close of the fourteenth century, declared that the rotting trunk of the monastic establishments cumbered the ground. In 1414 over one hundred alien priories were suppressed. In 1489 Pope Innocent the Eighth issued to the Archbishop of Canterbury a commission for a general investigation. Parliament itself had petitioned Henry the Fourth for seizure of the possessions they administered so ill. Wolsey had from within the Church seen the decadence of the Abbeys and Priories, and himself suppressed a number of the smaller houses and devoted their property to the better use of education. It is a cloud of witness to the general and cumulative disgust of the times with the enclosed life. The Commissioners came to Battle, dressed fantastically in the plunder of other religious houses they had ransacked on their way, “decked in the spoils of the desecrated chapels, with copes for doublets, tunics for saddle-cloths, and the silver relic-cases hammered into sheaths for their daggers.” They, in short, committed on their side almost as many excesses as the foul-living, blasphemous monastic brethren had on theirs; but they had this excuse: that if they indeed made a mockery of religion, it was the monks themselves first showed them the way of it.