by a passage with several flights of steps. The palace of Beaumont was situated nearly on the site of Beaumont street, a fragment of it was standing so lately as 1828 and is engraved in Ingram's Memorials of Oxford. It was built by King Henry the First, and was a favourite residence of that monarch and his immediate successors, especially Henry the Second. Richard the First was born in it. Henry the Third greatly enlarged and almost rebuilt it. The Liberate Rolls furnish minute particulars of his works here as in other places, and shew in a curious manner how carefully the king himself directed all the works to be done; he is well known to have had a great taste for architecture and building, and gave great encouragement to the arts by example as well as by precept. A few extracts from these valuable records may perhaps be interesting to our readers. : 1244. "The sheriff of Oxford is ordered to wainscote the king's hall at Oxford to the extent of five couples or bays beyond the king's seat: and to make in the same hall, on the north and south side, two fair upright windows with white glass casements to open and shut and to make before the door of the same hall a fair and decent porch and if the other windows of the same hall are in need of repair he is to repair them. He is to wainscote the chancel of the king's chapel throughout to remove the leaden windows of the same chapel and to put glass in their stead. He is also to wainscote the queen's chapel, and to cause to be well painted in front, behind the altar, the images of the Crucifixion with Mary and John, and under the rood beam the history' of the Lord's Supper. Woodstock, Feb. 11." 1246. "To roof our larder and kitchen at Oxford where needful, and to raise the flue of the chimney of the queen's chamber, and to renew also the pictures of the tablet before the altar in the same queen's chapel," &c. And on the 7th of August in the same year "The sheriff of Oxford is ordered on the day in which obsequies shall be celebrated in the town of Oxford for the soul of Isabel late queen of England, the king's mother, to cause all the poor clerks of the university of Oxford to be fed in the king's hall at Oxford; and all the friars, preachers and minors, of the same town to be fed in their own houses; and to make a kitchen for the use of the king's household, on the vacant ground between the larder and the king's kitchen." Some other details are ordered in the following year, and in 1250 "to affix two iron candlesticks to the columns nearest to the king's dais in the hall at Oxford." Again, in 1255 "The sheriff of Oxford is ordered to repair and roof the king's houses and walls outside the castle of Oxford, to wit the king's chamber and chapel, the kitchen, salsary, scullery, poultry, the great gateway, the chamber of Edward the king's son, the queen's wardrobe, and the further chamber of the servants." Windsor, Jan. 25. These extracts furnish several particulars illustrating the manners and customs of the thirteenth century. The high sheriff of Oxfordshire of the present day would be rather surprised to receive similar orders. We see that the Norman keep was speedily abandoned for a more commodious residence, and used only as a place of security in extremity, the actual residence of the royal family being without the walls, and this does not appear to have been fortified at all, or very slightly. Yet this palace must have been of considerable extent, as it contained two chapels, one for the king, the other for the queen; and two kitchens, one for the royal family, the other for the household; besides the great hall, large enough to accommodate all the poor scholars of the university, and various other chambers and offices. It is probable that the greater part of these structures were of wood only, from the frequent mention of repairs; the roofs were also probably covered with wooden shingles, which made them also in continual need of repairs, so that when the king had occasion to remove from one palace to another it was always necessary beforehand to write to the sheriff and instruct him to see that the house was made habitable. The general custom of those days was to build houses almost entirely of wood, except the towers and walls of enclosure for defence. Stone buildings for ordinary purposes were rather the exception than the rule, and this accounts for our having so few of them remaining. Wherever a substantial stone building has been erected, the foundations, or some other vestiges of it, generally remain; the cut stone has commonly been removed, but the rough stone does not pay for the cost of removal, or the labour of digging out the foundations. The palace of Beaumont was given by Edward the Second to the Carmelites, and became one of their principal monasteries, but the king retained the right to reside there when in Oxford, which was exercised by several of his successors. An account of this monastery will be found in the Monasticon, and the seal of it has been engraved in the Archæologia. This seal represents the king presenting his palace to a company of monks, the blessed Virgin standing by; beneath are the arms of the city of Oxford, an ox crossing a ford. This gift was made in performance of a vow which the king had taken in his Scottish wars when in imminent peril, at the instigation of his confessor, a monk of the order. The popular attachment still borne to the memory of lion-hearted Richard, may cause some of the travellers or the sojourners who wander through Oxford, to visit with interest that portion of the ancient city, where his bold heart first began to beat. Alas, "the poor scholars," whom, as we have said, the royal hall was capacious enough to contain, no longer sit at royal feasts; we no longer see a hungry crowd of students hurrying into the royal presence, digging into good venison pasties excellently seasoned by the palace cooks, and urged by the kingly host to put aside all book learning and to feast right joyously. Not but what good cheer may yet be found lingering amid college halls, and cookery is not a matter wholly contemned in the classic scene. We wish indeed that there were more poor scholars," and such an enlargement of modern Oxford as would give poor students good learning and bed and board at a moderate cost. THE POULTRY MANIA. WE are in the midst of a poultry mania. Cochin China fowls, Bantams, Dorkings, pigeons of all sorts and shapes, Pouters, Nuns, and Tumblers, are now engaging, we may say engrossing, the minds and energies of no small portion of our energetic friend, the Public. We know that it is our lot to rave periodically; we have our periodical frenzies, our succession of insanities. Something is taken up from time to time, and that something, whatever it may be, is pursued, studied, talked of, rushed after with the force and fury of a lover's passion. Dwelling, as it appears, under the necessity of manias, in the land of hobbies, we cannot be surprised to find poultry in their turn on the insecure and the changeable throne of public favour. The eye, the comb, the toes, and the tails of fowls, have now become in their turn the objects. of adoration. Like the bulls and serpents of heathen lands, they are now attracting their ardent groups of worshippers; and many who but lately were profoundly ignorant of the more esteemed forms and hues, have rapidly acquired, in their obedience to hobbyism, the most exact knowledge of their minutest characteristics. Many whose sole acquaintance with this portion of the feathered race had been kept up by the agreeable but murderous medium of knives and forks, now discourse with eloquent zeal on the long legs or the short legs, the yellow legs or the blue legs, the colour of the neck feathers or the colour of the tail feathers, as if the destinies of mankind, all progress and prosperity, all peace and plenty, all social advancement and success, hung on the efficient maintenance of the aristocracy of cocks and hens. It is difficult to account for the infection which there evidently is in these varying, changing manias, for the rapidity with which the infection spreads, for the extent and range it takes; above stairs, below stairs, in kitchens, in counting houses, in country houses, in suburban villas, upwards, downwards, northwards, southwards, the fancy of the day makes way; acute gentlemen on the stock exchange, ruddy squires, guards on railways, noblemen and their butlers, persons in parliament and persons out of parliament, all now-a-days are for poultry; the talk is of fowls; we are bitten, we are mad the stone has been thrown in the water, and the rippling circle it has made gets wider and wider stil!, takes a larger and larger sweep; we know not where it will end. In consequence of this wide excitement, this passion, this rage for fowls, we find a poultry literature on the rise; we have our poultry essayists, our poultry historians, and we may have our poultry poets. We have learned volumes and practical volumes on the subject; some writers, like Mr. Dixon, quoting Chaucer, raking up all ancient allusions to fowls, going back to medieval poultry, the antiquarians of cocks and hens. Others, like Mr. Baily, take a more homely and utilitarian line, having an eye, in the midst of their ardour, for dinnertable results. And then come too the poultry shows, with their judges, their prizes, their struggles, their rivalries, the fatting and the feeding, the toils and watchings of anxious and feverish competitors. To argue against manias is sheer waste of lungs or ink. All that is left us is to make a judicious selection of manias; to have our more approved madnesses, to commend those that are more rational, if we may speak of reasonable frenzies and sensible insanities, and to protest against those of a sillier and more frivolous kind. It is some comfort to us at the present time to feel that we can see a bright side and a useful side in the poultry mania. There have been worse manias than this. We do not indeed affect the slightest sympathy with the mere fashion-followers, who would be enamoured of pigs and donkeys if they were but "the thing," the fashion of the day; and we have no especial care for the large class of persons well-off in the world, who are now giving large sums for fancy fowls, unless they have some patriotic desire of sustaining the breed for the general good. Many high-paying purchasers we are ready to believe have some public spirit. But we have a strong idea that the love of animals, and the rearing of them, are very humanizing and softening tastes, and that if a mania suggests the care of them to the lower classes, who after their mechanical monotonous toils want something living to take charge of, it would be doing good service. Those who live amid machinery, looms, shops, work-rooms, and factories, would be benefited by having their "pets," their domestic animals at home, whether fish or fowl, dogs or rabbits. We love to see for the same reason the cultivation of flowers; and the stunted geranium in a broken jug, dangling perilously on a summer's day on the sill of some upper story in some dark |