SECTION III.-What happened to the principal agents.. 143 SECTION IV. The names of the Lords Spiritual who were present in Parliament upon Friday the 23rd of May, 31 Henry VIII., being the fifteenth day of the Parliament, when the Bill for assuring the Monas- teries, &c., to the King was passed The particulars of divers Monasteries in Norfolk, where- of the late Owners, since the Dissolution, are EDITORS' PREFACE. THE HISTORY OF SACRILEGE, now for the first time reprinted, was commenced by sir Henry Spelman about the year 1612. He has related the motive that induced him to undertake its composition. Possessed of the sites of Blackborough and Wormgay Abbeys, in Norfolk, he was involved in continual and expensive lawsuits, and when they were finally given up by him he found that he had been " a great loser, and not beholden to fortune, yet happy in this, that he was out of the briars, but especially that hereby he first discerned the infelicity of meddling with consecrated places." He appears to have carried on his collections till the year 1632, when he began to arrange them; the last date of any fresh entry in his memoranda is November 22, 1634. On his death, the papers were entrusted to the Stephens, himself an care of the rev. Jeremy author of some reputation, b and who had evidently been acquainted with, and interested in, the progress of the work.' The Great Rebellion rendered publication, for many years, impossible. "At length, in the year 1663," says à Wood, "Mr. Stephens began to print the History of Sacrilege." Bishop Gibson tells us, "I have been informed by a learned divine, since a prelate of our Church," (Dr. Simon Patrick is perhaps meant,) "that Mr. Stephens was forbidden to proceed in an edition of that work, lest the publication of it should give offence to the nobility and gentry. But whatever was the occasion of its continuing in the press till the fire of London, it has been taken for granted, that the whole book was irrecoverably lost; and I was satisfied of the same, upon Mr. Wood's relation of the matter; till examining some MSS. which were given to the Bodleian Library, by the late bishop of Lincoln,” Dr. Thomas Barlowe,-"I met with a transcript of some portion of it. Upon further inquiry, I found other parts in other places; so that the work now seems to be pretty entire." Mr. Gibson was then preparing for the press his edition of Spelman's Remains; and would have included this among his other posthumous works, "but that some persons," he says, "in the present age would be apt to interpret the mention of their 1 He left behind him, according to à Wood, in MS., "The design of the Cormorants upon the Church Lands, defeated in the time of K. Hen. 5, effected in the time of K. Hen. 8." predecessors, in such manner, and upon such an occasion, as an unpardonable reflection upon their families." Gibson was a "safe" man, and attained to three bishoprics. Thus, a second time, the History of Sacrilege seemed consigned to oblivion. Bafore this period indeed, Clement Spelman, puisne baron of the exchequer in the time of Charles II., had, in the Preface to the De Non Temerandis Ecclesiis, made a kind of abstract of the History of Sacrilege, inserting some further particulars, which we shall notice in their place. But immediately after Gibson's publication of the Remains, an unknown editor became possessed of a true copy of our work. He calls himself 66 a less discreet person" than Mr. Gibson, "who will e'en let the world make what use of it they please." And so, in 1698, the History of Sacrilege was published for the first time. For, though Watt speaks of an edition of 1693, it is evident that he must be mistaken, because Gibson's publication bears date January, 1698; when, as we have seen, there is direct evidence from Gibson that it was unpublished. The original title-page concludes, "To which is added, the Beginners of a Monastic Life, in Asia, Africa, and Europe, by sir Roger Twisden, knt. and bar." Some few copies have this treatise at the end of the volume; in some it does not occur. As this pamphlet has but little connexion with the work itself, and is possessed of but small merit, (other |