breast, it appeared to him, he said, as if his feet rested again on some
higher place: until then he had been neither on earth nor in heaven.

Now there was no visible imagination that came to him then; he said
expressly that it was not so. There was none to be seen there but the
priest in the vestment with his hood on his shoulders, and the _frater
conversus_ [that is, the lay brother.] who held the skirt and shook the
bell. Only it appeared to him that the priest held up the Body for a
great space, and in that long time Master Richard understood many things
that had been dark to him before. Of some of the things I have neither
room nor wit to write; but they were such as these.

He understood how it was that souls might go to hell, and yet that it
was good that they should go; how it was that our Saviour was born of
His blessed Mother without any breaking of her virginity; how it is that
all things subsist in God; in what manner it is that God comes into the
species of the bread. But he could not tell me how these things were so,
nor what it was that was shewed him.... [There follow a few confused
remarks on the relations of faith to spiritual sight.]

There were two more things that were shewed him: the first, that he
should not return home alive, but that his dead corpse should be carried
there, and the second, what was the tidings that he should bear to the
King.

Then he fell forward on his face, and so lay until the ending of the
mass.