A.B.1246. ARCHDEACON (XP WESTMINSTER ELECTED ABBOT. 273 your cities and dioceses ; in order that by his pious intervention ye may be able here to be saved from imminent dangers, and in aie world to come may obtain the reward of everlasting salvation. But that the multitude of the Christian people may flock with more zeal and in greater numbers to his venerable tomb, and that the solemn festival of the saint may be celebrated with more distinction, we hereby, in the case of all true penitents and confessing sinners, who shall come each year with reverence on the day of that festival to that place, to ask for the aid of his influence, trusting in the mercy of Almighty God, and the authority of the blessed Peter and Paul his apostles, grant a remission of one year and forty days of the penances enjoined them, and to those who come each year to the aforesaid sepulchre within one week of that festival, we grant a remission of forty days. Given at Lyons, on the eleventh of January, in the fourth year of our pontificate." When then this edict was published throughout the length and breadth of all Christendom, it very naturally renewed an incalculable joy in the hearts of all the faithful, but especially of the English, because it was England which had produced that saint, and presented him to God. And on the same day on which the aforesaid Saint Edmund was canonized, Master Richard de Crokesle, archdeacon of Westminster, was at Westminster elected abbot of that church, with the unanimous consent of the whole chapter; both because he was found to be a man competent and well suited to the office, and also because he was a friend of and acceptable to the king, on whose power the church's work now half destroyed, or one might rather say, the whole state of the church depended. He was elected, I repeat, on the day of the canonization of Saint Edmund, but without the approbation of God, as I think it pious to believe, since by that election both the lover and the loved* object received a manifold increase of honour on the same day. On which account, at the same time, by command of the lord the king, the dignity of that abbacy was increased, the abbot being authorized for aie future to celebrate mass in all respects after the fashion of a pontiff. For while the aforesaid abbot, Master Richard, was filling the office of archdeacon, he was a devoted and unwearied lover of the blessed Edmund. Which the abbot elect re membering, and being no ungrateful requiter of favours, he VOL. II. τ