were entertained by the Prior. The common herd in those early days were entertained at the guest house, a building facing the main road, on a site now occupied by a house called “The Priory.” King John in 1202 had given his hunting-lodge to the Priory, and from that time onward Kings and Queens were lodged in the Priory itself. Here rested—the next halting-place from Stony Stratford the body of Queen Eleanor on the way to Westminster, in 1290; and one of the long series of Eleanor crosses remained in the market-place until 1643, when it was destroyed by the Parliamentary troops. In the Lady Chapel (long since swept away) of the Priory Church, Cranmer promulgated the divorce of Henry VIII. and Katherine of Arragon. Two years later, the Priory itself was dissolved. At first it seemed likely that Dunstable would be made the seat of a Bishop and the great church erected to the dignity of a Cathedral, but the project came to nothing, and the sole remaining portions of the old buildings are the nave and the west front. Presbytery, choir, transepts, lady chapel, and aisles were torn down. The aisles and east end of the church are modern, the nave a majestic example of Norman architecture, and the west front a curiously picturesque mass of Transitional Norman, Early English, and Perpendicular, worthy the dexterous pencil of a Prout. [Illustration: DUNSTABLE PRIORY CHURCH.] The spoliation of the Priory Church was a long but thorough process. Many of its carved stones are worked into houses and walls in and around the town, but it was left for modern times to complete the vandalism; when, for example, great numbers of decorative pillars and capitals were discovered, some put to use to form an “ornamental rockery” in a neighbouring garden, the remaining cartloads taken to a secluded spot in the downs and buried; when the stone coffin of a prior was sold for use as a horse-trough and afterwards broken up for road-metal; when a rector could find it possible to destroy a holy-water stoup, the old font could be thrown away, and the pulpit sold to a publican for the decoration of a tea-garden. Among other objects that have disappeared in modern times is the life-size effigy of St. Fredemund, the sole remaining portion of his shrine. Fredemund was a son of King Offa. His body had been brought hither in ancient times, on the way to Canterbury, but was, by some miraculous interposition, prevented from leaving Dunstable. No miracle saved his statue. The ancient sanctus bell of the church, inscribed “Ave Maria, gracia plena,” hangs on the wall of the modern town-hall.