CLOCK-TOWER, ST. ALBANS.
BARNARD'S HEATH.
In the town of St. Albans, near the abbey and at the junction of two streets, stands the ancient clock-tower, built in the early part of the fifteenth century, and mainly of flint. It occupies the site of an earlier one said to have been erected by two ladies of Verulam, who, wandering alone in the woods and becoming lost, saw a light in a house, sought refuge there, and erected the tower on the site as a memorial of their deliverance. The bell in this tower was in former days used to ring the curfew. The town itself has little to show. In the church of St. Peter, among the monumental brasses, is the one to a priest often quoted, that reads:
"Lo, all that here I spent, that some time had I;
All that I gave in good intent, that now have I;
That I neither gave nor lent, that now abie[A] I;
That I kept till I went, that lost I."
Edward Strong, the mason who built St. Paul's Cathedral in London under the direction of Wren, is also buried in this church. Its chief tenants, however, are the slain at the second battle of St. Albans in the Wars of the Roses. At the first of these battles, fought in 1455 on the east side of the town, Henry of Lancaster was wounded and captured by the Duke of York. The second battle, a much more important contest, was fought on Shrove Tuesday, February 17, 1461, at Barnard's Heath, north of the town, and near St. Peter's Church. Queen Margaret of Lancaster led her forces in person, and was victorious over the Yorkists under the Earl of Warwick, liberating the captive king, who was in the enemy's camp, and following the battle by a ruthless execution of prisoners. King Henry, who had gone to St. Alban's shrine in tribulation when captured in the earlier contest, also went there again in thanksgiving when thus liberated six years later. The town of St. Albans, by the growth of time, has stretched across the Ver, and one straggling suburb reaches into the north-western angle of the ruins of ancient Verulam, where it clusters around the little church of St. Michael within the Roman city. This is a plain church, built in patches, parts of it nearly a thousand years old, and is the burial place of Francis Bacon, who was Baron of Verulam and Viscount St. Albans. Within a niche on the side of the chancel is his familiar effigy in marble, where he sits in an arm-chair and contemplatively gazes upward. From these ruins of Verulam is obtained the best view of St. Alban's Abbey, with the town in the background, overlooked by its clock-tower.