142 THE ESSEX NATURALIST.
In the summer of the year 1267 Henry III. dwelt at the Abbey for
two months, at the conclusion of the war between the Crown and the rebel
barons under Simon de Montfort : the old chronicler says: "Upon three
weeks after Easter the King came to Ham, three miles from London,
and was lodged himself in the Abbey of the White Monks at Stratford."
Later sovereigns entertained at the Abbey were Henry IV. in 1411 and
1412, and Edward IV. in 1467, In the conventual church was buried,
in 1335, John de Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Essex, High Constable of
England.
The later history of the Abbey of Stratford Langthorne during suc-
ceeding centuries, in spite of a grievous temporary setback in the 14th
century, caused by floods which necessitated the removal of the monks
to a grange belonging to the abbey at Burstead, from which they returned
when King Richard II. re-edified Stratford abbey, followed the usual
course of increasing prosperity, exemption from taxation and exploitation
of the wealth of the countryside, common to all monastic institutions,
which provoked the increasing irritation of the people and the hostility
of successive monarchs. "Riches and indolence brought this powerful
"order into decay"; yet one debt of gratitude at least we owe the
Cistercians: in the 12th and 13th centuries they were consistent pro-
moters of Gothic architecture and gave much attention to agricultural
and horticultural development.
A curious tale is told of the duplicity of one of the later Abbots, shortly
before the Dissolution. In 1521, the then abbot borrowed £40 from a
certain John a Parys, giving out that he had to pay a large sum to the
King by way of loan; and he gave a formal receipt for that amount.
Four years later, however, Parys confessed that the transaction was an
agreed subterfuge, designed to make the abbey appear poorer than it
actually was, so that the King's collectors might assume it to be in extreme
poverty. As a matter of fact, the borrowed £40 was kept locked in a chest
and was never made use of. It also appears that Parys was never repaid
his loan !
At the Dissolution in 1538 the estimated annual income of the Abbey
was approximately £652. [In 1658 the West Ham Abbey lands, then
vested in the Crown, yielded £15,100 annually !] Henry VIII, granted
the site of the Abbey and its precincts to Sir Peter Mewtis, or Meautis,
his ambassador to France: it remained in the Meautis family until 1633,
when Henry Mewtis sold the site, with the Abbey mills and 240 acres
of land, to Sir John Nulls; whose son conveyed it in 1663 to Thomas
Meads, and others, from whom it passed to Richard Knight. In 1786
Dudlas Knight sold the site to Thomas Holbrook, whose nephew, one
Richardson, inherited it on the death of his uncle at age 73 in 1811. After
this it was split up among various owners: John Tucker, calico-printer,
had his factory on part of the site in 1839 and after him James Kayess: in
these premises the two-light window, about to be referred to, was situated.
To-day, unhappily, scarcely a trace of the Abbey exists. Messrs.
Robert Ingham, Clark and Co.'s office-building stands approximately
on the site of the "Gesten Hall": the two-light shouldered headed 13th
century window—the sole fragment of the Abbey building still standing,
although itself not strictly in situ—which is now rebuilt in the modern