There is no evidence in the long broad street of Dunstable town of the age and ancient importance of the place. It looks entirely modern, and the Priory church is hidden away on the right. When—in the course of a century or so—the young limes, sycamores, and chestnuts, planted on either side of that main thoroughfare, have grown to maturity, the view coming into Dunstable from London will be a noble one. At present it is merely neat and cheerful. No mention is made of Dunstable in Doomsday Book. When that work was compiled, the old Roman station of Durocobrivæ, occupied in turn by the Saxons and burnt to the ground by marauding Danes, lay in a heap of blackened ruins, the only living creatures in the neighbourhood the fierce robbers who lay wait for travellers at this ancient crossing of the Watling and the Icknield Streets. If any of the surveyors who took notes for the making of Doomsday Book were so rash as to come here for that purpose, certainly they must have perished in the doing. At that period and until the beginning of Henry I.’s reign the road was bordered by dense woodlands, affording a safe hiding-place for malefactors, chief among whom, according to an absurd monkish legend, purporting to account for the place-name, was a robber named Dun. The ruined town and the impenetrable thickets were known, they said, as “Dun’s Stable.” The first step towards reclaiming the road and the ruins from anarchy and violence was the clearing of these woods. This was followed by the building of a house—probably a hunting-lodge—for the King, and the founding of the once powerful and stately Priory of Dunstable, portions of whose noble church remain to day as the parish church of the town. To the Augustine priors the town and its market rights were given, and the place, new-risen from its ashes, throve under the combined patronage of Church and State. Whatever the religious merits of those old monks may have been, certainly they were business men, stock-raisers, and wool-growers of the first order. Their flocks and herds covered those downs that remain much the same now as eight hundred years ago, and their Dunstable wool was prized as the best in the kingdom. But these business-like monks were not altogether loved by the townsfolk, who resented the taxes laid upon them by the Church, all-powerful here in those days. It seemed to men unjust that fat priors and their crew should command the best of both worlds: should wield the keys of heaven and take heavy toll of goods in the market. The townsfolk, indeed, in 1229 made a bold stand, and protesting that they “would sooner go to hell than be taxed,” vainly attempted to form a new settlement outside the town. The sole results were that they were taxed rather more heavily than before, and ecclesiastically cursed. To detail here the grandeur and the pride of that great Priory would be to halt too long on the way. All who had, in those ancient times, any business along this great road