Then the same thing happened to the Saxon church which had been done by Saxon arms to the British church. It was destroyed, or at least plundered, by the Danes. The priests, who perhaps took refuge in London, saved their relics. After a hundred years of fighting, the Dane, too, came into the Christian fold. As soon as circumstances permitted, King Edgar, stimulated by Dunstan, rebuilt or restored the church, and brought twelve monks from Glastonbury. He also erected the monastic buildings after the Benedictine Rule; and, as Stanley has pointed out, since in the monastery the church or chapel is built for the monks, the monastic buildings would be finished before the church.

THE FUNERAL PROCESSION OF KING EDWARD THE CONFESSOR TO WESTMINSTER ABBEY. FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY.

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Next, Edgar gave the monks a charter in which these lands are described and the boundaries laid down. You shall see what a goodly foundation—on paper—was this Abbey of St. Peter when it left the King’s hands. Take the map of London: run a line from Marble Arch along Oxford Street and Holborn—the line of the new Watling Street—till you reach the church of St. Andrew’s, Holborn; then follow the Fleet river to its mouth—you have the north and east boundaries. The Thames is a third boundary. For the fourth, draw a line from the spot where the Tyburn falls into the Thames, to Victoria Station;

thence to Buckingham Palace; thence north to Marble Arch. The whole of the land included belonged to the Abbey. A little later the Abbey acquired the greater part of Chelsea, the manor of Paddington, the manor of Kilburn, including Hampstead and Battersea,—in fact, what is now the wealthier half of modern London formerly belonged to the Benedictines of Westminster. At the time of Edgar’s charter, however, they had the area marked out above. More than half of it was marsh land. In Doomsday Book there are but twenty-five houses on the whole estate. Waste land lying in shallow ponds, sometimes flooded by high tides, only the rising ground between what is now St. James’s Park and Oxford Street could then be farmed. The ground was reclaimed and settled very slowly; still more slowly was it built upon. Almost within the memory of man snipe were shot over South Kensington; a hundred years ago the whole of that thickly populated district west and southwest of Mayfair was a land of open fields.

So that, notwithstanding the great extent of their possessions, the monks were by no means rich, nor were Edgar’s buildings, one imagines, very stately. Yet the later buildings replaced the older on the same sites. A plan of the Abbey of Edgar and Dunstan would show the Chapter-house and the Church where they are now; the common dormitory over the common hall, as it was afterward; the refectory where it was afterward; the cloisters, without which no Benedictine monastery was complete, also where are those of Henry III. But the buildings were insignificant compared with what followed.

Roman Britain, we have said, was Christian for at least a hundred and fifty years; the country was also covered with monasteries and nunneries. Therefore it would be nothing out of the way or unusual to find monastic buildings on Thorney in the fourth century. There was as yet no Benedictine Rule. St. Martin of Tours introduced the Egyptian Rule into Gaul—whence it was taken over to England and to Ireland. It was a simple Rule, resembling that of the Essenes. No one had any property; all things were in common; the only art allowed to be practiced was that of writing; the older monks devoted their whole time to prayer; they took their meals together,—bread and herbs, with salt,—and, except for common prayer and common meals, they rarely left their cells: these were at first simple huts constructed of clay and bunches of reeds; their churches were of wood; they shaved their heads to the line of the ears; they wore leather jerkins, probably because these lasted longer than cloth of any kind; many of them wore hair shirts. The wooden church became a stone church; the huts became cells built about a cloister; the cells themselves were abolished, and a common dormitory was substituted. Then came the Saxons, and the monks were dispersed or fled into Wales, where they formed immense monasteries, as that of Bangor, with its three thousand monks. All had to be done over again, from the beginning. But monasticism, once introduced, flourished exceedingly among the Saxons, until the long war with the Danes destroyed the safety of the convent and demanded the service of every man able to carry a sword, and there were no more monks left in the land. All of which is necessary to explain why Dunstan had to people his Abbey with monks brought from Glastonbury. For Glastonbury and Abingdon, into which the Benedictine Rule had been introduced, were then the only monasteries surviving the long Danish troubles.