How Master Richard saw the King in Westminster Hall: and of the Mass at
Saint Edward's Altar


_Revelabit condensa: et in templo ejus omnes dicent gloriam._

He will discover the thick woods: and in His temple all shall speak His
glory.--_Ps. xxviii. 9._


IV


Master Richard did not tell me a great deal of his welcome in the
monastery: I think that he was hardly treated and flouted, for the
professed monks like not solitaries except those that be established in
reputation; they call them self-willed and lawless and pretending to a
sanctity that is none of theirs. Such as be under obedience think that
virtue the highest of all and essential to the way of perfection. And I
think, perhaps, they were encouraged in this by what had been said of
themselves by our holy lord ten years before, for he was ever a favourer
of monks. [This may have been Eugenius IV., called _Gloriosus_. If so,
it would fix the date of Richard at about 1444.] But Master Richard did
not blame them, so I will not, but I know that he was given no cell to
be private in, but was sent to mix with the other guests in the common
guest-house. I know not what happened there, but I think there was an
uproar; there was a wound upon his head, the first wound that he
received in the house of his friends, that I saw on him a little later,
and he told me he had had it on his first coming to London. It was such