And these were precisely the feelings that prompted the establishment here of the Dominican abbey at the instance of its English foundress, Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt, married in 1386 John, the Master of Avis, the high-minded and patriotic bastard of the royal house, who had successfully resisted Spanish aggression the year before, and, with the assistance of the English archers at Aljubarrota, had gained for himself the crown of Portugal. Here in the neighbourhood of the battle, at the instance of Philippa, was built this abbey of Dominican monks in devotional thankfulness for the signal victory, and for the rescue of the King from threatened death. All through the older portion of the building the English Plantagenet influence is predominant, and marks the abbey as being entirely different from all other ecclesiastical buildings in Portugal. The monastery was always a poorly endowed one, in glaring contrast to the neighbouring Cistercian house of Alcobaça, one of the richest monastic houses in the world. Beckford, in his humorous description of his visit to both houses in 1782, draws a lively comparison between the two. Accompanied by two great Portuguese prelates, of whom he makes merciless fun, he had gone to see Alcobaça at the wish of the Prince Regent. His great train of servants and attendants had been received with lavish splendour and Gargantuan gluttony at Alcobaça, and on the way with the prelate of the latter house to visit Batalha, the whole party had got drunk at Aljubarrota, whose wine is famous. They arrived at Batalha at night. “Whilst our sumpter mules were unloading, and ham and pies and sausages were rolling out of plethoric hampers, I thought these poor monks looked on rather enviously. My more fortunate companions—no wretched cadets of the mortification family these, but the true elder sons of fat mother church—could hardly conceal their sneers of conscious superiority. A contrast so strongly marked amused me not a little.... The Batalha prior and his assistants looked quite astounded when they saw the gauze-curtained bed and the Grand Prior’s fringed pillow, and the Prior of St. Vincent’s superb coverlid, and basins and ewers and other utensils of glittering silver being carried in. Poor souls! they hardly knew what to do or say or be at—one running to the right, another to the left—one tucking up his flowing garments to run faster, and another rebuking him for such a deviation from monastic decorum.” I have in my library a manuscript account by Lord Strathmore of the visit he paid to the two monasteries twenty years before Beckford, and his account of the poverty of Batalha in comparison with Alcobaça is more emphatic still. He says:—