[Footnote 11: A convent is properly a _body_ of monks or nuns; a monastery or nunnery their habitation. The etymology of Coventry is dubious; but the popular derivation from the Lat. _conventus_ is now discredited. The earliest form in which the word occurs is Cofantreo. Here treo = tree, and Dr Hen. Bradley, to whom I am greatly indebted for information on this point, suggests a possible origin of the other syllables in a personal name, Cofa or Cufa; _cf._ Oswestry = Oswald's tree.] [Footnote 12: See Matt. v. 20. This translation mainly follows Birch.] [Footnote 13: Privilege of administering justice.] [Footnote 14: Obscure. Birch says privilege of vouching to warranty.] [Footnote 15: Power to punish for forcible entry.] [Footnote 16: Power to inflict punishment for waylaying.] [Footnote 17: Power to punish assault with bloodshed.] [Footnote 18: Power to punish assault.] [Footnote 19: Power to maintain watch.] [Footnote 20: Power to punish for breach of peace.] [Footnote 21: Add. MSS. Ch. 28657. Birch, _Edward the Confessor's Charter to Coventry_. "A most elegant specimen of eleventh century native palæography" (Birch).] [Footnote 22: On events which occur before 1154 (or 1188) the chronicler is dependent on some earlier unknown writer (_Dict. Nat. Biography_, _s.v._ "Godiva").] [Footnote 23: They follow Higden, author of the _Polychronicon_, who was the first to mention the ride in this connection. As a monk of S. Werburgh's, Chester, a city which held frequent intercourse with Coventry, he may have had opportunities of hearing the tale from local sources.] [Footnote 24: In Coventry market the burgesses were free from toll, except for horses, in the time of Edward I. (Dugdale, _Warw._ i. 162).] [Footnote 25: Dugdale, _Warw._ i. 135. Some tiny fragments of this window yet remain in the Archdeacon's Chapel of Trinity Church. See also _Gent. Mag._ (1829), pt. i. 120-1, for another account of the fragment.] [Footnote 26: _Leet Book_ (E.E.T.S.), 567.] [Footnote 27: Rog. Wendover, _Flores Historiarum_, i. 497.] [Footnote 28: So an old sexton told Sharp, the antiquary. See also _Gent. Mag. Topography_, xiii. 53.] [Footnote 29: _Science of Fairy Tales._] [Footnote 30: Chambers, _Mediæval Stage_, i. 119.] [Footnote 31: Grant Allen, _Evolution of the Idea of God_, 110 (festival of the Pòtraj).] [Footnote 32: Hartland, _op. cit._, 77.] [Footnote 33: As a tyro in folk-lore I venture with some diffidence to put forward the theory that it may be by research in custom and belief as regards the horse that we may arrive at an explanation of some of the problems of this mysterious legend. See Grimm, _Teut. Myth._ (trans. Stallybrass), 47, 392; Frazer, _Golden Bough_, ii. 24, 64; Gomme, _Ethnology and Folk-lore_, 35; Chambers, _op. cit._, i. 131.] [Footnote 34: Rudder, _Gloucestershire_, 307 (quoted Hartland).]