Solution to Maseeh Hall

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Answer: RICHARD THE FIRST

by Anderson Wang, Azalea Weisblat, Jon Schneider, Lewis Chen and Rahul Sridhar

The feeder answers for this meta are those from the student puzzles with two pairs of eight-letter words as their answer:

ARCHIVED EDITIONS
HOSPITAL BENEFITS
GATHERER CHILDREN
DISTINCT FEATURES

The first thing we notice - and likely the reason we figured out those are the answers for this metapuzzle - is that we can lay out these answers onto the chessboard so that ARCHIVED is in the A file, EDITIONS is in the E file, and so on. The answers are laid out bottom-to-top, consistent with the numbering of a standard chess board.

DSNTSSRL
ETECNEEA
VIRNORRT
IFDIIUEI
HELTTTHP
CNISIATS
REHIDEAO
ABCDEFGH

Now we return to the chess diagram in the puzzle. If we try to use the rook to capture the pawns, we notice there is only one valid path by which we can capture all the pawns, capturing exactly one per move:

Reading the letters on the squares of the captures, in the order of the captures, we get RICHARD THE FIRST.

DSNTSSRL
ETECNEEA
VIRNORRT
IFDIIUEI
HELTTTHP
CNISIATS
REHIDEAO
ABCDEFGH