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 A HISTORY OF LONDON repair of the church, the payment of commons, and to salaries were applied to other uses.** The commissioners appointed by the king to make the visitation attributed the blame largely to the dean, Richard de Ellesfield,'* and he was removed. Twenty years afterwards, in 1343, another inquiry was necessary owing to the waste and dilapidation of the church and its possessions through the negligence of its deans,*' and in 1344 a lawsuit had arisen because Dean John de Heselarton, after declining to take the part he should have in the election of the master of the hospital of St. Leonard Newport, which was sub- ject to St. Martin's, had refused to admit the priest elected, and had committed the custody of the hou^e to another.*^ On the occasion of the visitation of 1343 the two canons resi- dent had a grievance against Heselarton about the portion assigned to them from the commons of the church on account of residence, and it was ordained by the Lord Chancellor in 1345 that they and future canons resident were to receive /20 a year between them besides pit- tances and obits.*' An extensive improvement to the church appears to have taken place between 1258 and 1 261 when Henry III gave the canons marble columns and* stone for the construction of a pulpit, some sculptured figures of kings for decoration and 200 freestones for the chapel of St. Blaise.'" It is not unlikely that the bishops of Coventry, Durham and Laodicea in offering relaxation of penance in 1260 to those who visited and prayed at the tomb of Matilda de la Fauconere de la Wade in St Martin's'^ may have intended to help the church as well as benefit Matilda's soul. The dean and chapter certainly secured a great benefit for themselves by obtain- ing permission in 1286 to close the road running from Foster Lane to St. Nicholas Shambles,'* as the canons had found the public road between their houses and the church so inconvenient that in the reign of Henry III they had spanned it with causeways. '^ Although the outside world was thus shut out it could still make itself painfully evident to the ministers of St. Martin's, for dung-heaps were raised by the neighbours so near the wall of the close that, as the dean and chapter complained in 1331, the air in their church and dwellings was corrupted.'* Unless ^'' Cal. of Pat. 1321-4, pp. 355 and 385. "^Cal. of Close, 1323-7. P- 303- " Cal. of Pat. I 343-5, p. 99, 1 85. ^ Ibid. pp. 329, 346. A claim was made under this settlement in the six- teenth centur'. Ibid. No. 13215. ™ Hist. MSS. Com. Rep. i, App. i, 95. " Doc. of D. and C. of Westm. St. Martin le Grand, parcel 2.  Ibid, parcel I.  Ibid. Henry III gave them leave to do so in 1257. the buildings of St. Martin's had been greatly neglected it is hardly conceivable that the wind could have played such havoc with the church, bell-towers and cloisters that the canons despaired of repairing them and in 1360 thought of abandoning the place.'* The state of affairs disclosed in 1343 could not have been remedied at once, and a bequest of Dean Useflete shows that the cloister at least needed some repairs in 1348,'* the eve of the Black Death. This terrible epidemic by carrying off the cultivators left the lands of the college waste and desolate, and its income consequently inadequate even to the ordinary expenditure." The situation was saved in 1360 by the munificence of the dean, William de Wykeham, who at his own expense not only restored but beautified the church and cloister, and built a chapter-house adorned with a worked stone ceiling.'* This new chapel was consecrated and dedicated " to the Holy Trinity '"^ in 1378. It is evident that the resources of St. Martin's had received from the Plague a blow from which they took long to recover : in 1372 the pope granted a special indulgence to those visiting the church on certain feast-days during the next twenty years ; ^"^ in 1381 the king exempted the canons from payments of tenths and subsidies during the life of Walter Skirlawe, then dean,'"^ a term extended to thirty years in 1384,'"' and in 1385 gave them the advowson of the church of Bassingbourn with licence to appropriate.^"* The income of the church or its ministers '"* was augmented during this period by the endowment of a chantry by Joan Hemenhale in 1361,'"^ of others by John Band, canon resident, in 1370*°'' and Thomas Stodelee in 1395,'"* and the appropriation to St. Martin's in 1399 of St. Botolph's without Aldersgate."" It is clear that in the fourteenth century the position of St. Martin's as a royal free chapel was secure, for its ecclesiastical immunities rather increased than diminished, A suit in 1354 over the tithes and oblations of St. Alphage's Cripplegate was brought by the former parson of " Dr. Button's excerpt from Pat. Rolls, Harl. 6960, given in Dugdale, Mon. Angl. vi, 1323. '^ He left for this purpose twenty-four cows and a bull to the college. Sharpe, Cal. of Wills, ii, 2. " Cal. of Pap. Letters, vi, 208. °' Dugdale, op. cit. vi, 1323. " Doc. of D. and C. of Westm. Cartulary dorso. "" Ibid. St. Martin le Grand, parcel 3, No. 13215. "" Cal. of Pap. Letters, iv, 177. "" Cal. of Pat. 1377-81, p. 619. Ibid. 1381-5, p. 375. Ibid. p. 552 '" The chantries of Hemenhale and Band were each served by a perpetual vicar. Doc. of D. and C. of Westm. No. 132 15. •"•^ Sharpe, Cal. of mils, ii, 46. "" Doc. of D. and C. of Westm. London L. i, 2. ™ Cal. of Pat. I 391-6, p. 639. "" Lend. Epis. Reg. Braybook, fol. 176. 560
 * ' Doc. of D. and. C. of Westm. Cartulary dono.
 * ' Ibid, parcel 2, Cartulary Jcrso.