ways, and various were the means resorted to for procuring those supposed benefits. It was necessary to propitiate the living in order to induce them thus to serve the dead. Monasteries were founded or enlarged to secure these advantages for the benefactors; and kings and other influential persons were included in the prayers and masses so purchased to obtain their patronage and protection. From a like motive were churches occasionally erected, but more frequently were chantries founded in existing churches. Not a few of the aisles of parish churches were additions made for purposes of this kind. How far such practices might have gone, but for impediments of a legal nature, it were impossible to say. As is well known, statutes prohibiting the devoting of land to these and similar uses were enacted early in our national history, especially that de religiosisin the 7th Edward I., making the licence of the King and other chief lords necessary to the validity of such donations, or gifts in mortmain as they were called. The King and other great feudal lords were materially interested in the matter, as they lost by these endowments many advantages which would otherwise have accrued to them, not only military and other services, but also the wardships and marriages of heirs, and the pecuniary payments that became due on the deaths of tenants and the alienations of the lands. Whether from political considerations or less worthy motives I will not pretend to determine, but the cost of obtaining from the Crown the requisite licence for such gifts became after a while so great as to amount almost to a refusal; and as land was, we must remember, in those days the only kind of property from which a permanent income was derivable, it was a great obstacle, where perpetual masses were desired, not to be able to provide for them by gifts of land or rents. This led to other expedients being devised to accomplish the same ends. One of them was to pay down a sum of money to some religious house on security being given that a priest should celebrate masses there for the deceased, either for a certain time or for ever, as the bargain might be. The Paston Letters afford an example both of the difficulty and the remedy, almost contemporaneous with the deed exhibited. Sir John Fastolf, who was desirous of founding a college of priests to pray for his soul, wrote, about 1457, to his cousin John Paston, to move the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Winchester [for their influence with the King], that he might have a licence to amortise without any great fine, in recompense of his long service to the King and his father, which had never been rewarded; and since he intended to make the King founder and ever to be prayed for, and to have prayers also for his right noble progenitors, his father, and uncles, he (Sir John) thought he ought not to be denied his desire. The letter in reply, which
