In 1147 Stephen and his wife, Matilda, founded an abbey of Benedictine monks here at Faversham in honour of Our Lord, and known as St Saviours, upon land she had obtained from William of Ypres, Stephen's favourite captain, in exchange for her manor of Littlechurch in this county.

That is what the priest will invoke for you all, when you leave this abbey.

Edward the Confessor, though hallowed at Winchester, looked upon London as his capital and there built the great abbey which was thenceforth to see the crowning of England's kings.

" The monasteries and churches, wherein they hoped to find treasures, were the favorite object of the Northmen's enterprises; in particular, they plundered, at the gates of Paris, the abbey of St. Germain des Prés and that of St. Denis, whence they carried off the abbot, who could not purchase his freedom save by a heavy ransom.

He entered the abbey unobserved, and having shut himself into his cell, he abandoned his soul to the tortures of unavailing remorse.

What makes the steward, Joe Murray, an interesting object to me, is that the old man has seen the abbey in all its vicissitudes of greatness and degradation.

The Paladin and the giant quitted the abbey, the one on horseback and the other on foot, and journeyed through the desert till they came to a magnificent castle, the door of which stood open.

"Combustibles were hurled from the Bishop's Castle," William of Malmesbury tells us, "in the houses of the townspeople, who, as I have said, rather wished success to the empress than to the bishop, which caught and burned the whole abbey of nuns within the city and the monastery which is called Hyde without the walls.

So Sir Launcelot took great pleasure in the day and he went his way at so easy a pace that it was night-time ere he reached that abbey of monks where he was to meet Elouise the Fair.

He told her how he and his mother had lived at Morpeth, and how he hated it; how poor they had been, and how rich he should be; how he loved the abbey, and especially the old gallery, and the drums and armour; how he had been a day-scholar at a little school which he abhorred, and how he was to go some day to Eton, of which he was very proud.

'And the abbey; have you forgotten the abbey?'

The Duke of this wild province gave him the abbey of St. Gildas; but its inmates were ignorant and disorderly, and added insubordination to dissoluteness.

A few years after, King Edred granted the abbey to the Monastery of Christchurch at Canterbury, but the society was either removed or dissolved before the Norman Conquest.

It is a curious and a mystical fact, that at the period to which I am alluding, and a very short time, only a little month, before he successfully solicited the hand of Miss Milbanke, being at Newstead, he fancied that he saw the ghost of the monk which is supposed to haunt the abbey, and to make its ominous appearance when misfortune or death impends over the master of the mansion.

Beaulieu evidently very greatly increased in honour, for in 1509 its abbot was made Bishop of Bangor but continued to hold the abbey, and when he died the abbot of Waverley, the oldest house of the Order in England, succeeded him, the post being greatly sought after.

Such an event was actually foreseen by the sagacious monks who formerly inhabited the abbey, for they cut a canal nearly a mile long, to give the water vent; and the discharge by it continues to this day.

'I wish you knew the abbey, George,' said Venetia.

" "I am going away," he goes on, raising his voice to a louder tone of reckless unrest, "where?God knows!I do not, and do not care either!going away for good!I am going to let the abbey.

It may well be imagined that Chambord is the parody of the old castles, just as the Abbey of Thélème parodies the abbeys of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

In 1192 Bishop Savaric procured for the see the rich abbey of Glastonbury, and became its abbot; and he and his immediate successor, Joceline, the builder of the W. front of Wells, were styled Bishops of Bath and Glastonbury.

The oak screen across the S.E. aisle is in memory of a former rector (Rev. C. Kemble) who did much to restore the Abbey.

The thirty-second abbot, Robert Jolivet, promised to give the place up to them, and went to Rouen with that design; but one of his monks, John Enault, being elected vicar-general by the chapter, and supported by some valiant Norman warriors, offered an obstinate resistance for eight years, baffled all the attacks of the English, and retained the abbey in the possession of the King of France.

V The southern road was the shorter, but he wanted to see Moran and to hear when he proposed to begin to roof the abbey.

Fifteen years later he became abbot, and ruled the abbey for fifteen years, during which time Lanfrancthe mutual friend of William the Conqueror and the great Hildebrandbecame Archbishop of Canterbury.

One Bertrand, head of one of the companies of butchers, had been elected captain of St. Denis because he had saved the abbey from the rapacity of a noble Burgundian chieftain, Hector de Saveuse.