seen the breaking-up of the house, and their sorrowful departing, and the sudden spoil that fell the same day of their departure from the house. And every person had everything good-cheap, except the poor monks, friars, and nuns, that had no money to bestow of anything, as it appeared by the suppression of an abbey hard by me, called the Roche Abbey, a house of white monks, a very fair-builded house, all of freestone, and every house vaulted with freestone, and covered with lead (as the abbeys was in England, as well as the churches be). Some," he continues, "took the service-books that bed in the church, and laid them upon their wainecoppes to piece the same; some took windows of the hayleith and hid them in their hay; and likewise they did of many other things; for some pulled forth the iron hooks out of the walls that bought none, when the yeomen and gentlemen of the country had bought the timber of the church. For the church was the first thing that was put to the spoil; and then the abbot's lodging, dorter and frater, with the cloister, and all the buildings thereabout within the abbey-walls. It would have pitied any heart to see what tearing up of the lead there was, and plucking up of boards, and throwing down of the spars; and when the lead was torn off and cast down into the church, and the tombs in the church all broken, and all things of price either spoiled, carped away, or defaced to the uttermost."
"The persons that cast the lead into fodders plucked up all the seats in the choir, wherein the monks sat when they said service, which were like to the seats in minsters, and burned them, and melted the lead therewithall, although there was wood plenty within a flight-shot of them, for the abbey stood among the woods and the rocks of stone, in which rocks was pewter vessels found, that was conveyed away and there hid; so that every person bent himself to filch and spoil what he would. Yea, even such persons were content to spoil them that seemed not two days before to allow their religion, and do great worship and reverence at their mattins, masses, and other service, and all other their doings, which is a strange thing to say, that they could this day think it to be the house of God, and the next day the house of the devil; or else they would not have been so ready to have spoiled it."
He adds, his father, who bought the timber of part of the church, and the steeple and bell-frame ("in the which steeple hung viij yea ix bells," which "I did see hang there myself more than a year after the suppression"), and "thought well of the religious persons and of the religion then used," excused his participation in the spoil by arguing, "Might not I, as well as others, have some profit in the spoil of the abbey? for I did see all would away, and therefore I did as others did. And thus much," the writer adds, "upon my own knowledge touching the fall of the said Roche Abbey."— MS. Cole, vol. vii. Ellis, III. iii. 35.