The case, at which between three or four hundred witnesses were heard, was finally decided by “Thomas Fitz au Roy, Duc de Gloucestre, Counte de Bukyngham et Dessex, Constable Dengleterre,” who, after due care and deliberation, and the weighing of all the evidence, and consultation with wise and discreet persons, finally adjudged “les dites armes d’azure ove une bend dor avoir esté et estre les armes du dit Richard Lescrop.” And so ended this great case, which somehow puts the poet before us more clearly than even his “Canterbury Pilgrims.” And so we come back to the streets proper of Westminster--_i. e._, the slums on the west and south of the Monastery. There have always been slums here, even before the Sanctuary rabble and after. The streets lying about Tothill Lane, however, which were slums from the beginning, only began in the sixteenth century. The map of Anthony Van den Wyngeerde (A.D. 1543) shows only a few houses standing round about the Sanctuary in the northwest corner of the inclosure; there is a crowd of houses between King Street and the river, and on the west there is nothing but open country: that part of the City which contained the most infamous dens and the vilest ruffians, which was called the “Desert” of Westminster, lying to the south of Tothill Fields, grew up and ran to waste and seed in the course of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth we reaped the harvest of that seed; at the end of the nineteenth we are still pulling up the weeds and planting new flowers and sowing better seed. The “Desert” was bounded on the north by Tothill Street, Broadway, and Petty France, all with their courts--their sweet and desirable courts; its southern boundary was the Horseferry Road; the Abbey lay along the east; and the western marsh was the fringe of Tothill Fields, now marked by Rochester Row, or perhaps Francis Street. A little remains--here a court, there a bit of street--to mark what the place was like.