If the following story, told by John Wesley in his Diary of 1769, is correct, some people must have queer tastes, and strange stomachs:

“2nd Aug.—Some friends from London met us at St. Albans. Before dinner we took a walk in the Abbey, one of the most ancient buildings in the kingdom, near a thousand years old; and one of the largest, being 560 feet in length3 (considerably more than Westminster Abbey) and broad and high in proportion. Near the east end is the tomb and vault of good Duke Humphrey. Some, now living, remember since his body was entire; but after the coffin was opened, so many were anxious to taste the liquor in which it was preserved, that in a little time the corpse was left bare, and soon mouldered away. A few bones are now all that remain.”

The Duke Humphrey referred to was Humphrey Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, uncle to Henry the Sixth, who was renowned for his hospitality, and commonly called “The good Duke Humphrey.”

The “goodness” of Duke Humphrey must be, at the very least, an historic doubt. Born in 1391, the youngest son of Henry the Fourth, he was a man of affable and easy manners, cultured, and a patron of literature, and considered by the people a patriot. Those were the days when to be a “patriot” with one party was to be a “traitor” with another, and jealousy on the part of Queen Margaret, consort of his nephew, Henry the Sixth, caused his arrest at Bury St. Edmunds in 1447. The day after his arrest, the Duke died, not without suspicion of foul play; the times being such that the sudden death of any prominent person could never be put down to natural causes; which sufficiently shows the uncomfortable nature of those times. It seems, however, clear that he died from paralysis, brought on through a life of debauchery, and hastened by the shock of his arrest; but, if we may judge by the temper of the age, his death happened in time to prevent the political murder that assuredly would have been committed.

So much for the “goodness” of the “good Duke,” who, whatever his morals, was, if we are to believe the story told of him by Sir Thomas More, a good deal more keen-witted than most people. It seems that he completely exposed an impostor who claimed to have been born blind, but to have recovered his sight at the shrine of St. Alban. The Duke asked him the colours of the clothes himself and his suite were wearing, and they were readily given by the man, who did not perceive that, had he been born blind, he could not possibly know the names of colours. The answer exposed him, and he was put in the stocks. The story was long a favourite one at St. Albans, and forms a scene in the second part of King Henry the Sixth; and by the same token fortifies many in the belief that Bacon, and not Shakespeare, wrote that play.

There are a good many market-towns on the 317 miles between St. Albans and Berwick.

The Duke was buried hard by the shrine of St. Alban, where his magnificent chantry tomb, built by Abbot Wheathampstead, still remains, bearing amid its delicate sculptures the antelope, his badge. The leaden coffin of the Duke was opened in 1703, when the body was found “lying in pickle.”

The once well-known phrase, “dining with Duke Humphrey,” is variously explained. It seems to have originated with a visitor to the Abbey in the late sixteenth century having been accidentally locked in the chantry chapel all night. The humour of it spread to London and found a more poignant note in its application to the beggars and insolvent debtors who, with nothing else to do, paced the aisles of Old St. Paul’s. They went dinnerless, without the will to it, and were said to “dine with Duke Humphrey.”

That famous fourteenth-century traveller and writer of travel-lore, Sir John Mandeville, was, according to his own statement, born at St. Albans: a statement which, coming from such an accomplished liar as he who, more than any other before or since, has made “travellers’ tales” a byword, does not necessarily bear the stamp of truth. Indeed, modern commentators are not altogether satisfied that there ever was such a person as this Mandeville, who, if these carping critics be correct, was so incorrigible a fibber that he lied in saying he was ever born at all! Here we begin to flounder in heroics and the immensities; and the further we inquire, the more marvellous and inexplicable grows the mystery. Whether you take him as a real person, or as a myth, it is equally remarkable that an existent, or a non-existent, body should be buried in two places, as is claimed for Mandeville’s.

What purports to be the grave of the famous traveller is shown in this Abbey of St. Alban, near the west end of the nave. A tablet placed on the pillar above it formerly stated that Sir John Mandeville was born here, and here buried in 1372, having commenced his famous travels in 1322, and continued them through the greater part of the world during thirty-four years. There still remains on the pillar the curious black-letter inscription:—

This seems very straightforward and matter-of-fact, and might stand, were it not that an equally matter-of-fact tomb, with a long Latin epitaph to the same person, was frequently noted by visitors to the church of the FrÈres Guillemins in LiÈge, until 1798, when the church was destroyed, during the troubles of the French Revolution.

Such marvels as these are thoroughly in keeping with this prototype of Munchausen, whose wildest flights of acknowledged fancy do not approach the magnificent fictions of Mandeville, who appropriated all the most stupendously tall stories of Marco Polo and other narrators of the thing that was not, and added a skyscraping superstructure of audacious inventions of his own. Modern writers, with the fear of others who have been there, may well envy Mandeville, who could write of men whose heads grew under their arms, and yet be regarded by his contemporaries as truthful; or could convincingly talk of Ethiopia, after this sort:

“In Ethiope there are such men as have but one foot, and they go so fast that it is a great marvel; and that is a large foot, for the shadow thereof covereth the body from Sun or Rain when they lie upon their backs.”

Every man his own umbrella; what a splendid ideal!