Bishop Braybrooke died in the year 1404 (his epitaph says 1405), and he was buried in the Ladye Chapel of his cathedral, under "a faire marble stone inlaide with letters made every one of a several piece of brasse." Two-and-a-half centuries after his burial the cathedral was destroyed in the great fire of London, and on the removal of the rubbish for the rebuilding the tomb was found open, with the slab broken. "The body," as Camden states, "was found entire, the skin still inclosing the bones and fleshy parts; only in the breast there was a hole (made, I suppose, by accident) through which one might view and handle his lungs. The skin was of deep tawny colour and the body very light, as appeared to all who came to view and touch it, it being exposed in a coffin for some time without any offensive smell: and then reinterred."
At the period when this prelate lived, England was struggling to free itself from the shackles of its Norman and Angevin rulers. The feudal system had been introduced at the Conquest, which constituted the king the absolute master of the land; the barons were his vassals, holding their lands by tenures of military service, and the great mass of the people were either vassals of the barons, holding portions of land by knight's service, or were mere serfs, excepting some merchants and traders in the cities and towns, who enjoyed a modified species of freedom, for which special charters were granted by kings. The citizens of London have ever been famous for the bold and resolute way in which they have preserved and defended the liberties and immunities granted in such charters, and when Basset became their bishop they gladly welcomed him as one who would not be backward in lending them his countenance and assistance in any attempted invasion of their chartered rights.
Beyond this permissive freedom, however, they aimed at something further; the notion that kings were not the masters, but the servants, of the sovereign people had been bruited abroad, and the initiative had been taken by the barons, who revolted against the tyranny of John, and extorted from him the Magna Charta, in which they were backed by the Londoners and the merchants of other large towns; but the peasantry and labourers were too much down-trodden in serfdom to make any assertion of their natural rights, and it was not until more than a century afterwards that they, under Wat Tyler, Jack Cade, and other leaders, began to put forth the strange notion that they also were men with natural rights, which they ceased not to reiterate, until a couple of centuries afterwards they established their claims at Marston Moor and Naseby and Worcester.