dark and almost foamless water. In flood-time, both features are lost-the famous rocks are covered, and the dark thread is merged in a wide swirl of eddying foam.

To this treacherous chasm tradition attributes the untimely end of the young Romilly-the "boy of Egremont," and the founding of Bolton Priory. The legend cannot be more briefly told than in Wordsworth's well-known lines:

"Young Romilly through Barden Woods

Is ranging high and low,

And holds a greyhound in a leash,

To let slip upon buck or doe.

“The pair have reached that fearful chasm,

How tempting to bestride!

For lordly Wharfe is there pent in

With rocks on either side.

“The striding-place is called the Strid,1—
A name which it took of yore:

A thousand years hath it borne that name,
And shall a thousand more.

"And hither is young Romilly come,

And what may now forbid

That he, perhaps for the hundredth time,

Shall bound across the Strid ?

1 Not, however, by way of derivation. We know better nowadays,

and talk of Anglo-Saxon "stryth"=tumult.

"He sprang in glee,—for what cared he

That the river was strong and the rocks were steep?
But the greyhound in the leash hung back,

And checked him in his leap."

The foresters bring the news to the boy's mother, Alice de Romillé, and she, after an interval of speechless sorrow, decrees the founding of a priory "in Bolton, on the field of Wharfe." Neither the tradition, nor the poem founded on it, will be much the worse for being shown to conflict materially with ascertained facts.

The priory now at Bolton was founded first at Embsay, by William de Meschines and Cecilia, his wife. In 1151 Alice de Romillé, or Rumeli, their daughter, granted to the canons her manor of Bolton in exchange for those of Skipton and Stretton, and the priory was at once removed. This grant of Bolton, and the consequent removal of the canons, is connected by the legend with the death of the boy of Egremont, but Dr. Whitaker ruthlessly announced, in his History of Craven, that the "boy" was himself a party to the Charter of Translation. To those who cannot enjoy a tradition without a due admixture of truth, it may be some comfort to reflect that Cecilia de Rumeli, the mother of Alice, and original foundress of the priory at Embsay, may

quite possibly have lost a son in the way described by Wordsworth.

A "compotus" of the priory, from 1290 to 1325, gives many graphic details of its condition and history. Between 1316 and 1320 the invading Scots appear in very grim reality, and the accounts show the damages which their inroads left to be repaired. But meanwhile the prior is attending Parliament at York, twice in one year and once in another, and Bolton, in spite of everything, becomes an important place, with "armigeri," or dependent gentlemen, clothed, boarded, and lodged; free servants, indoor and out the former including master carpenter, master cook and assistant, brewer, baker, master smith, "hokarius," "fagotarius," and "ductor saccorum;" while John de Lambhird (Magister Bercarius), and from seventy to one hundred and eight more, worked out-of-doors on the farms and granges. sides these, there were "villeins" in gross who were practically domestic slaves.1 The prior has a separate lodging, chapel, and stables, built by one De Land, who seems to have been a great dignitary, and to have attended two sovereigns (Edward I and II), entertained two Metropolitans, and made two journeys to Rome.

Be

1 See, however, Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets, part ii. sonnet iv.