"Let my due feet never fail
To walk the cloisters hallowed pale,
With storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religions light,
And let the pealing organ blow
To the foil-voiced choir below,
Bring all heaven before mine eyes,
Dissolve me into ecstasies."
In the ruins of the abbey of St. Wilfred the spectator may notice a cross-legged knight, whose feet rest upon a vanquished lion. His whole attitude is expressive of intense action; the muscles seem strained in the effort to draw his sword and demolish a Turk, while the face expresses all that is noble in manly courage.
Hard by lies a prior in his vestments, his hands meekly clasped. The colour has not yet quite faded, which embellished the statue; but the remarkable thing is the face. Even yet, in spite of the broken and mouldering stone, there is a calmness of repose about that face which is simply wonderful.
It has been our task to call them both back to life--knight and prior, and to make them live in our pages. Pardon us, gentle readers, for the imperfect way in which we have fulfilled it.
Thus ends the Third and last Chronicle of Aescendune.
[i] Ordericus Vitalis, lib. iv. 523.
[ii] William of Malmesbury.
[iii] Sassenach equals Saxon.
[iv] It seems strange how such a misconception could ever have arisen and coloured English literature to so great an extent, for if we turn to the pages of the contemporaneous historians, such as Henry of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, Florence of Worcester, Ordericus Vitalis--born within the century of the Conquest--we find that they all describe the Anglo-Saxons as English, not Saxons.
[v] See the Second Chronicle, chapter VI.