There was a Cluniac monk from France who had obtained leave to say mass at the shrine of the Confessor, and Master Richard followed him and his fellow to the altar at five o’clock in the morning to hear mass there and see his Maker. [This is the common mediaeval phrase.  Men did not then bow their heads at the Elevation.]

He knelt down against the wall behind the high altar, and began to address himself to devotion, but he was distracted at first by the splendour of the tomb, the porphyry and the glass-work below, that Master Peter the Roman had made, and the precious shrine of gold above where the body lay, and the golden statues of the saints on either side.  All about him, too, were such marvels that there is little wonder that he could not pray well for thinking on them—­the kings that lay here and there and their effigies, and the paved steps on this side and that, and the fair painted glass and the high dark roof.  Near where he knelt, too, he could see the great relic-chest, and knew what lay therein—­the girdle of our Blessed Lady herself, mirror of chastity; the piece of stone marked by Christ’s foot as He went up to heaven; a piece of the Very Rood on which He hanged; the precious blood that He shed there, in a crystal vase; the head of saint Benet, father of monks. [Surely not!] All these things have I seen, too, myself, so I know that they are truly there.

Behind him, as he kneeled on the stones, sounded the singing of the monks, and the noise of so much praise delighted him, but they ended soon, and at Sanctus his spirit began to be rapt into silence, and the holy things to make heaven about him.

He told me that he did not know what befell him until it came to the elevation of the sacring:  only he knew that his soul was filled with lightness and joyousness, as when he had walked in the wood at dawn three days before.

But as he lifted up his hands to see his God and to beat upon his breast, it appeared to him, he said, as if his feet rested again on some higher place:  until then he had been neither on earth nor in heaven.

Now there was no visible imagination that came to him then; he said expressly that it was not so.  There was none to be seen there but the priest in the vestment with his hood on his shoulders, and the frater conversus [that is, the lay brother.] who held the skirt and shook the bell.  Only it appeared to him that the priest held up the Body for a great space, and in that long time Master Richard understood many things that had been dark to him before.  Of some of the things I have neither room nor wit to write; but they were such as these.

He understood how it was that souls might go to hell, and yet that it was good that they should go; how it was that our Saviour was born of His blessed Mother without any breaking of her virginity; how it is that all things subsist in God; in what manner it is that God comes into the species of the bread.  But he could not tell me how these things were so, nor what it was that was shewed him.... [There follow a few confused remarks on the relations of faith to spiritual sight.]