The Gatehouse is only by chance the Grammar School, for the school, itself founded about the year 1095 by the monks, was only removed hither in 1869. After the suppression of the Abbey and the demolition of most of its domestic buildings, the Gatehouse became the Sessions House and prison for St. Albans until 1651. Thenceforward, until 1869, it served the not dissimilar purpose of a House of Correction. Indeed, throughout its history, from the building of it in 1380, the great Gatehouse has served like purposes: the stewards of my lords abbots having held assize in the upper rooms and consigned offenders to the dungeons below. Offenders were many, for those ancient Churchmen, who lorded it autocratically over St. Albans, in temporalities as well as in spiritual matters, obtruded into all things. They were, as already shown, for education, and at an extraordinarily early period established the Grammar School: but they took care to excommunicate every other school in the neighbourhood, and none might buy nor sell, nor hold any privileges of market without the Church took toll of them. That there were those who, even in early days, kicked against the pricks of this combined jurisdiction over body and soul duly appears in the records of St. Albans; and they suffered in the Gatehouse the penalties awarded to all fire-brands, malcontents, and agitators, and all such pestiferous fellows. Wherefore the grey old building is a very interesting old relic indeed of those times which certain parties in the State (who ought properly to be flogged at the cart-tail) are eager to bring back. [Illustration: THE “FLEUR DE LIS.”] Of the inns of St. Albans I shall say little in this place, for much has been said of them in the pages of the HOLYHEAD ROAD and the GREAT NORTH ROAD. But a word or two, and a sketch, must be reserved for the “Fleur de Lis” inn, close by the Market Place. Like Canning’s “Needy Knife-Grinder” it has no story to tell, but its courtyard, with the odd little external staircase shown here, sufficiently justifies notice, even though in history, national or local, the house has no place. An effective item in the view—the object resembling a church-tower—is entirely extrinsic. It has nothing to do with the inn, except serving the purpose of composing a picture; nor is it even strictly ecclesiastical, being a fourteenth-century curfew-tower, once of remarkable interest, but shorn of much of that quality after Sir Gilbert Scott laid his heavy restoring hand on it, some forty years ago. XIII [Sidenote: _ST. ALBAN THE MARTYR_]