DURING the great rebellion of 1381 the tenants of St Alban's Abbey, led by one Walter Grindcobbe, petitioned the abbot to deliver to them charters held by the abbey that related the liberties of the vill. The abbot produced these charters, but as Stephen Justice has suggested, they seem to have lacked the confirmation of the freedoms that the rebels desired. These deficient charters were then burned, and the rebels demanded that the abbot produce one particular ‘ancient charter … with capital letters, one of gold and one of azure’. This charter, Thomas Walsingham tells us, was believed to confirm a series of liberties and privileges that had been granted to the townsfolk in the time of King Offa for their services in building the monastery. These privileges, they claimed, had once been enjoyed by the town, but had been slowly eroded over time by the abbot and the monks. The abbot, faced with pressure to produce the rumoured Anglo-Saxon charter, repeatedly denied its existence. Despite these denials the rebels would not accept that the charter did not exist, and eventually the abbot was forced to write out a new charter confirming King Offa's privileges.