There is a familiar Coventry variant of the Gascoigne story wherein the mayor, John Hornby, plays, as it were, the part of the Chief-Justice, since he, in 1412, say the City Annals or Mayor-lists--"arrested the Prince in the Priory [one MS. reads "city"] of Coventry." Unfortunately the source whence this information is obtained--the MS. Annals or Mayor-lists--is not above suspicion. The annals are a collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documents,[221] varying slightly among themselves, but evidently, as far as the bulk of the earlier entries are concerned, copies of a common original, now probably lost. A chronological tangle, they contain most valuable and authentic information--particularly about the mystery plays--coupled with entries that are manifestly corrupt. It is conceivable that the earliest annalist placed on record that the prince "rested," _i.e._ remained at the priory during that particular mayoralty, or that he was concerned in some arrest made at the time, and that the entry has been transformed by the errors of successive copyists. In the latter case the process could be paralleled by the entry of 1425 when the MSS. gave as the principal event in the mayoralty of John Braytoft:--"He arrested the Earl of Warwick and brought him to the Gaol of this city." This is, beyond all possibility of doubt, an error. No Earl of Warwick was ever arrested at Coventry. Thomas Sharp, who worked eighty or ninety years ago, from documents that have been since destroyed, gives the early, correct version, borne out by independent testimony, when he reads: "The Earl of Warwick came to Coventry to seize on the Franchises, and inquisition was made of John Grace, and the mayor arrested him and brought him to the Gaol of the City."[222] It is therefore possible that similar errors may have crept into the Hornby entry, though this cannot be dismissed as a pure invention until a searching investigation has been made of contemporary records. Henry V. seems to have been much beloved in Coventry, if we may judge by the hearty welcome given to him on his coming thither on March 21, 1421. The mayor and council ordered that £100 and a gold cup worth £10 should be presented to the King, and the same to the Queen "in suo adventu a Francia in Coventre," for those times a truly magnificent gift. The citizens never thereafter beheld the King. For in the following year, being overtaken at the Bois de Vincennes by a so grievous sickness that his physicians told him he had but two hours to live, he bade his confessors chant the Penitential Psalms. And in the midst of their chanting, as if in answer to an unseen adversary, he cried: "Thou liest, thou liest! My part is with the Lord Jesus." Thus died Henry V.