this actual year Leland writes of ‘their Howse, Medow, Orchard, and a litle Wood,’ which he mentions as being walled in, and, seeing that the wall enclosed nearly sixteen acres, it appears probable that the gray-cloaked men can scarcely have been ignorant of all the luxuries of life. Notwithstanding this, they stoutly refused to acknowledge the King’s supremacy, and suffered accordingly. Going back to the reign of Henry VII. or thereabouts, we come across the curious ballad of ‘The Felon Sow of Rokeby and the Freres of Richmond’ quoted from an old manuscript by Sir Walter Scott in ‘Rokeby.’ It may have been as a practical joke, or merely as a good way of getting rid of such a terrible beast, that ‘Ralph of Rokeby, with goodwill, The fryers of Richmond gaver her till.’ Friar Middleton, who with two lusty men was sent to fetch the sow from Rokeby, could scarcely have known that she was ‘The grisliest beast that ere might be, Her head was great and gray: She was bred in Rokeby Wood; There were few that thither goed, That came on live [= alive] away. ‘She was so grisley for to meete, She rave the earth up with her feete, And bark came fro the tree; When fryer Middleton her saugh, Weet ye well he might not laugh, Full earnestly look’d hee.’ To calm the terrible beast when they found it almost impossible to hold her, the friar began to read ‘in St. John his Gospell,’ but ‘The sow she would not Latin heare, But rudely rushed at the frear,’ who, turning very white, dodged to the shelter of a tree, whence he saw with horror that the sow had got clear of the other two men. At this their courage evaporated, and all three fled for their lives along the Watling Street. When they came to Richmond and told their tale of the ‘feind of hell’ in the garb of a sow, the warden decided to hire on the next day two of the ‘boldest men that ever were borne.’ These two, Gilbert Griffin and a ‘bastard son of Spaine,’ went to Rokeby clad in armour and carrying their shields and swords of war, and even then they only just overcame the grisly sow. They lifted the dead brute on to the back of a horse, so that it rested across the two panniers, ‘And to Richmond they did hay: When they saw her come, They sang merrily _Te Deum_, The fryers on that day.’