Read Ebook: England under the Angevin Kings Volumes I and II by Norgate Kate

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She took him into her confidence without an instant's hesitation.

"My cousin Archie--you may have noticed--you were looking on last night--he's a very careless player, and headstrong too. But he can't afford to lose any, and I don't want him to come to grief. You see, I'm rather fond of him."

"Well?"

The man's brows were drawn down over his eyes. His expression was not encouraging.

"Well," she proceeded, undismayed, "I saw you looking on, and you looked as if you knew a few things. So I thought you'd be a safe person to ask. I can't look after him; and his mother--well, she's worse than useless. But a man--a real strong man like you--is different. If I were to introduce you, couldn't you look after him a bit--just till we get across?"

With much simplicity she made her request, but there was a tinge of anxiety in her eyes. Certainly West, staring steadily forth over the grey waste of tumbling waters, looked sufficiently forbidding.

After several seconds of silence he flung an abrupt question:

"Why don't you ask some one else?"

"There is no one else," she answered.

"No one else?" He made a gesture of impatient incredulity.

"No one that I can trust," she explained.

"And you trust me?"

"Of course I do."

"Why?" Again he looked at her with a piercing scrutiny. His eyes held a savage, almost a threatening expression.

But the girl only laughed, lightly and confidently.

"Why? Oh, just because you are trustworthy, I guess. I can't think of any other reason."

West's look relaxed, became abstracted, and finally fell away from her.

"You appear to be a lady of some discernment," he observed drily.

She proffered her hand impulsively, her eyes dancing.

"My, that's the first pretty thing you've said to me!" she declared flippantly. "I just like you, Mr. West!"

West was feeling for his cigarette case. He gave her his hand without looking at her, as if her approbation did not greatly gratify him. When she was gone he moved away along the wind-swept deck with his collar up to his ears and his head bent to the gale. His conversation with the American girl had not apparently made him feel any more sociably inclined towards his fellow-passengers.

Certainly, as Cynthia had declared, young Archibald Bathurst was an exceedingly reckless player. He lacked the judgment and the cool brain essential to a good cardplayer, with the result that he lost much more often than he won. But notwithstanding this fact he had a passion for cards which no amount of defeat could abate--a passion which he never failed to indulge whenever an opportunity presented itself.

At the very moment when his cousin was making her petition on his behalf to the surly Englishman on deck, he was seated in the saloon with three or four men older than himself, playing and losing, playing and losing, with almost unvarying monotony, yet with a feverish relish that had in it something tragic.

He was only three-and-twenty, and, as he was wont to remark, ill-luck dogged him persistently at every turn. He never blamed himself when rash speculations failed, and he never profited by bitter experience. Simply, he was by nature a spendthrift, high-spirited, impulsive, weak, with little thought for the future and none at all for the past. Wherever he went he was popular. His gaiety and spontaneity won him favour. But no one took him very seriously. No one ever dreamed that his ill-luck was a cause for anything but mirth.

A good deal of money had changed hands when the party separated to dine, but, though young Bathurst was as usual a loser, he displayed no depression. Only, as he sauntered away to his cabin, he flung a laughing challenge to those who remained:

"See if I don't turn the tables presently!"

They laughed with him, pursuing him with chaff till he was out of hearing. The boy was a game youngster, and he knew how to lose. Moreover, it was generally believed that he could afford to pay for his pleasures.

But a man who met him suddenly outside his cabin read something other than indifference upon his flushed face. He only saw him for an instant. The next, Archie had swung past and was gone, a clanging door shutting him from sight.

When the little knot of cardplayers reassembled after dinner their number was augmented. A short, broad-shouldered man, clean-shaven, with piercing blue eyes, had scraped acquaintance with one of them, and had accepted an invitation to join the play. Some surprise was felt among the rest, for this man had till then been disposed to hold aloof from his fellow-passengers, preferring a solitary cigarette to any amusements that might be going forward.

A New York man named Rudd muttered to his neighbour that the fellow might be all right, but he had the eyes of a sharper. The neighbour in response murmured the words "private detective" and Rudd was relieved.

Archie Bathurst was the last to arrive, and dropped into the place he had occupied all the afternoon. It was immediately facing the stranger, whom he favoured with a brief and somewhat disparaging stare before settling down to play.

The game was a pure gamble. They played swiftly, and in silence. West seemed to take but slight interest in the issue, but he won steadily and surely. Young Bathurst, playing feverishly, lost and lost, and lost again. The fortunes of the other four players varied. But always the newcomer won his ventures.

The evening was half over when Archie suddenly and loudly demanded higher stakes, to turn his luck, as he expressed it.

"Double them if you like," said West.

Rudd looked at him with a distrustful eye, and said nothing. The other players were disposed to accede to the boy's vehement request, and after a little discussion the matter was settled to his satisfaction. The game was resumed at higher points.

He played as a man possessed, swiftly and feverishly. It seemed that he and West were to divide the honours. For West's luck scarcely varied, and Rudd continued to look at him askance.

For the greater part of an hour young Bathurst won with scarcely a break, till the spectators began to chaff him upon his outrageous success.

"You'd better stop," one man warned him. "She's a fickle jade, you know, Bathurst. Take too much for granted, and she'll desert you."

But Bathurst did not even seem to hear. He played with lowered eyes and twitching mouth, and his hands shook perceptibly. The gambler's lust was upon him.

"He'll go on all night," murmured the onlookers.

But this prophecy was not to be fulfilled.

himself and all his property to Fountains. It was the turn of the tide; other donations began to flow in; soon they poured. Five years after its own rise the "Fountain" sent out a rivulet to Newminster; after that her descendants speedily covered the land. Justly did the brotherhood cherish their beloved elm-tree as a witness to the lowly beginnings whence had sprung the mightiest Cistercian house in England. It bore a yet more touching witness four centuries later, when it still stood in its green old age, the one remnant of the glory of Fountains which the sacrilegious spoiler had not thought it worth his while to touch.

So says the historian of Fountains. How this can have been, in Yorkshire and at Christmas-time, I cannot pretend to explain.

The influence of the Cistercians was different in kind from that of the earlier monasticism. The life of the Benedictines was, so to say, in the world though not of it. They sought tranquillity and retirement, but not solitude; the site of an abbey was chosen with a careful eye to the natural resources of the place, its accessibility, and the advantages which it offered for cultivation and production of all kinds. A Benedictine house almost invariably became, and indeed was intended to become, the nucleus of a flourishing lay population, either a cluster of rural settlements, or, not unfrequently, a busy, thriving town. But by the close of the tenth century, although the palmy days of the Benedictine fathers as the guardians of art and literature were in part still to come, the work in which they had been unrivalled for five hundred years, as the missionaries, cultivators and civilizers of Europe, was well-nigh accomplished; and the position into which they had unavoidably drifted as owners of vast landed property protected by special privileges was beginning to show its dangerous side. On the one hand, the secularizing spirit which had made such inroads upon the Church in general was creeping even into the cloister. On the other, the monasteries were growing rich and powerful at the expense of the parochial and diocesan organization. The laity were too apt, while showering their pious gifts upon the altars of the religious houses, to leave those of their own parish churches naked and uncared-for; and the growing habit of diverting the tithes of various estates and districts to the endowment of some abbey with which they were quite unconnected was already becoming a distinct abuse. Against all this the scheme of the Cistercians was a direct protest. They refused to have anything to do with tithes in any shape, saying that monks had no right to them; their houses were of the plainest possible construction: even in their churches scarcely an ornament was admitted to soften the stern grandeur of the architecture; there were no broidered hangings, no delicate paintings, no gold and silver vessels, no crucifixes glittering with enamel and precious gems; they hardly allowed, even for the most solemn rite, the use of any vestment more ornate than the simple white surplice or alb; and their ordinary habit, made from the wool of their flocks, was not black like that of the Benedictines, but the natural white or gray, for they looked upon dyeing as a refinement useless to men who had renounced the cares and pleasures of this life as well as the deceitfulness of riches. Their aim was to be simply voices crying in the wilderness--a wilderness wherein they were resolved to dwell, as much as possible, alone. Their rule absolutely forbade the erection of a house even of their own order within a certain distance of another. But the cry that came forth from the depth of their solitude thrilled through the very hearts of men, and their influence spread far beyond the number of those who actually joined the order. It was the leaven of that influence, more than all others, which worked on and on through the nineteen years of anarchy that followed Henry's death till it had leavened the whole lump, regenerated the Church, and made her ready to become in her turn the regenerator of the state and the nation. Already, before the order of Citeaux had been half a century in existence, William of Malmesbury, himself a member of one of the most ancient and famous of English Benedictine abbeys, could describe it as the unanimously acknowledged type of the monastic profession, the ideal which served as a mirror to the diligent, a goad to the negligent, and a model to all.

How deeply the spirit of religious enthusiasm had penetrated among the people we see in the story of S. Godric. Godric was born in the last years of the Conqueror or the earliest years of the Red King at Walpole, a village in the north-western marshlands of Norfolk; thence his parents, AElward and AEdwen, seem to have removed to a place on the river Welland, near Spalding in Lincolnshire. They were apparently free rustics of the poorest class, simple, unlearned, upright folk, who taught their three children to say the Creed and the Lord's Prayer, and brought them up in the fear of God; other education they could give them none, and of worldly goods just as little. In the dreary fenland round the shores of the Wash agriculture and industry were almost unknown, and the population subsisted chiefly on whatever they found left behind by the waves on the long reaches of shining sand that lay exposed whenever the tide was out. As a boy Godric once wandered thus nearly three miles out to sea in search of food for himself and his parents; as he was retracing his steps, laden with part of a large fish which he had at length found dead upon the sand, he was overtaken by the returning tide; press onward as he might, the waves came surging higher and higher, first to his knees, then to his waist, then to his shoulders, till to the boy's excited fancy their gurgling rose even above his head, and when at last he struggled to land with his burthen, it seemed to him that only a miracle had brought him through the waters in safety. Presently he began an independent life as a wandering chapman, trudging from village to village and selling small wares to country-folk as poor as himself. The lad was gifted with a wisdom and seriousness beyond his age; after some four years of this life he became associated with some merchants in the neighbouring towns; with them he visited the castles of the local nobles, the markets and fairs of the local trading centres, and at length made his way as far as S. Andrews in Scotland, and after that to Rome. He next, entering into partnership with some other young men, acquired a fourth share in the profits of one trading-vessel and half the ownership of another. Very soon his partners made him captain of the ship. In the long, blank days of his boyhood by the shore of the Wash he had learned to discern the face of both sea and sky; and his sturdy frame, steady hand, and keen observant eye, as well as his stedfast thoughtful temper, fitted him for a skilful seaman no less than for a successful merchant. The young sailor's heart, however, was not wholly set upon money-getting. As he tramped over the fens with his pack upon his back he had been wont to soothe his weariness with the holy words of prayer and creed learnt at his mother's knee; as he guided his bark through the storm, or outran the pirates who were ever on the look-out for such prey, he did not miss the lesson specially addressed to those who "go down to the sea in ships." Wherever his business took him--Scotland, Britanny, Flanders, Denmark--he sought out the holy places of the land and made his offerings there. One of the places he visited most frequently was S. Andrews; and on his way back from thence he rarely failed to turn aside to S. Cuthbert's old home at Holy Isle and his yet more lonely retreat at Farne, there to spend hours in ecstatic meditation upon the hermit-life which he was already longing to imitate. At last he took the cross and went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On his return, weary of independence, he became steward to a rich man who intrusted him with the whole management of his household; soon, however, he grew so disgusted with the thievery among the servants, which he saw but could not prevent, and with the master's indifference to it, that he threw up his situation and went off on another pilgrimage, first to S. Gilles in Provence and then to Rome. He came home to his parents, but he could not stay; he must go back yet a third time, he told them, to the threshold of the Apostles; and this time his mother accompanied him. At a period when religious men of greater experience in this world's affairs were pouring out heart-rending lamentations over the corruptions of Rome, it is touching to see that she still cast over this simple English rustic the spell which she had cast of old over Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop. It was in the land of Wilfrid and Benedict, in the wild Northumbria, with its long reaches of trackless moor and its mighty forests, scarcely penetrated save by the wild beasts, that Godric at last found refuge from the world. He sought it first at Carlisle, then a lonely outpost on the western borders of the moors, just beginning a new life after its conquest by William Rufus. His hopes of remaining there in obscurity were, however, defeated by the recognition of a kinsman, doubtless one of the Red King's colonists, and he fled yet further into the wilderness. Weeks and months of lonely wandering through the forest brought him unexpectedly to an aged hermit at Wolsingham; there he remained nearly three years, tending the old man until his death; then a vision of S. Cuthbert sent Godric off again, first on another journey to Holy Land, and then to a hermitage in Eskdale near Whitby. Thence the persecution of the lord of the soil drove him to a surer refuge in the territory of S. Cuthbert. He settled for a while in Durham and there gave himself up to practical works of piety, frequenting the offices of devotion, giving alms out of his penury to those who were yet poorer than himself, and constantly sitting as a scholar among the children in the church of S. Mary. His kinsman at Carlisle had given him a Psalm-book; whether he ever learned actually to read it is not clear; but he already knew by heart a considerable part of the Psalter; at Durham he learned the whole; and the little book, which he had carried in all his wanderings, was to the end of his life his most cherished possession. When asked in later years how one of his fingers had grown crooked, he answered with a smile that it had become cramped with constantly grasping this book. Meanwhile he was seeking a place of retirement within easy distance of the chief object of his devotion--S. Cuthbert's shrine. His choice was decided by the chance words of a shepherd to his comrade: "Let us go water our flocks at Finchale!" Godric offered the man his sole remaining coin--a farthing--to lead him to the spot, and saw at once that he had reached the end of his wanderings.

Even to-day the scene is wild and solemn enough, to the traveller who, making his way from Durham over the lonely country-side, suddenly dips down into a secluded hollow where the ruins of Finchale Priory stand on a low grassy ledge pressed close between the rushing stream of Wear and the dark wooded hills which, owing to the sharp bend made by the river, seem to close round it on every side. But in Godric's day the place was wilder still. The road which now leads through the wood was a mere sheep-track worn by the feet of the flocks as they made their way down to the river; the site of the priory was a thicket of briars, thorns and nettles, and it was only on a narrow strip of rocky soil hanging over the water's edge and thinly covered with scant herbage that the sheep could find a foothold and the hermit a place for his dwelling. His first abode was a cave scooped in the rock; later on he seems to have built himself a little hut with an oratory attached. A large stone served him at once for table and pillow; but only when utterly worn out with a long day's toil in clearing away the thickets and preparing the soil for cultivation would he lie down for a few hours of quiet vigil rather than of sleep; and on moonlight nights the rustics of the country-side woke with a start at the ring of the hermit's axe, echoing for miles through the woodland. The spirit of the earlier Northumbrian saints seems to breathe again in Godric's ceaseless labour, his stern self-mortification, his rigid fasts, his nightly plunges into the Wear, where he would stand in the hollow of the rocks, up to his neck in the stream, singing Psalms all through the winter nights, while the snow fell thick on his head or the waters froze around him. With the fervour of the older asceticism he had caught too its poetic tenderness. As he wandered through forest after forest from Carlisle to the Tees he had found like S. Guthlac of old that "he who denies himself the converse of men wins the converse of birds and beasts and the company of angels." Noxious reptiles lay passive beneath his feet as he walked along and crawled harmlessly about him as he lay on the bare ground at night; "the hissing of a viper scared him no more than the crowing of a cock." The woods of Finchale were thronged with wild beasts of every kind; on his first arrival he was confronted by a wolf of such enormous size that he took it for a fiend in wolf's shape, and the impression was confirmed when at the sign of the Cross the animal lay down for a moment at his feet and then slunk quietly away. The toads and vipers which swarmed along the river-side played harmlessly about the floor of his hut, and basked in the glow of his fire or nestled between his feet, till finding that they disturbed his devotions he gently bade them depart, and was at once obeyed. A stag browsing upon the young shoots of the trees in his little orchard suffered him to put a halter about its neck and lead it away into the forest. In the long hard frosts of the northern winter he would roam about seeking for frozen or starving animals, carry them home in his arms and restore them to warmth and animation at his fire. Bird and beast sought shelter from the huntsman in the hermit's cell; one stag which he had hidden from the followers of Bishop Ralf came back day after day to be petted and caressed. Amid the silence of the valley, broken only by the rustling of the wind through the trees, the ripple of the stream over its rocky bed, and the chirping of the birds who had probably given their name to the "Finches-haugh," strains of angel-harps and angel-voices sounded in the hermit's ears; and the Virgin-Mother came down to teach him how to sing to her in his own English tongue. As the years went on Godric ceased to shrink from his fellow-men; his mother, his sister, came to dwell near him in religious retirement; a little nephew was admitted to tend his cow. Some of the younger monks of Durham, among them the one to whom we owe the record of Godric's life, were the devoted attendants of his extreme age; while from the most distant quarters men of all ranks flocked to seek counsel and guidance in every variety of circumstances, temporal and spiritual, from one whom not only all Durham but almost all England looked upon as a saint and a prophet.

In strictness, we must except the years 1043-1066, when the Abingdon Chronicle is also contemporary.

Precious as it is to us, however, this English chronicle-work at Peterborough was a mere survival. Half its pathetic interest indeed springs from the fact that it stands utterly alone; save in that one abbey in the Fens, English had ceased to be a written tongue; the vernacular literature of England was dead. If the reviving national sentiment was to find a literary expression which could exercise any lasting and widespread influence, the vehicle must be not English but Latin. This was the work now taken up by the historical school of Worcester. Early in the twelfth century a Worcester monk named Florence made a Latin version of the Chronicle. Unhappily, he infused into his work a violent party spirit, and overlaid the plain brief statements of the annals with a mass of interpolations, additions and alterations, whose source it is impossible to trace, and which, adopted only too readily by later writers, have gone far to bring our early history into what until a very recent time seemed well-nigh hopeless confusion. But the very extent of his influence proves how true was the instinct which led him--patriot of the most narrow, insular, exaggerated type, as the whole tone of his work shows him to have been--to clothe the ancient vernacular annals in a Latin dress, in the hope of increasing their popularity. If English history has in one way suffered severely at his hands, it owes him a debt of gratitude nevertheless upon another ground. While the last English chronicle lay isolated and buried in the scriptorium at Peterborough, it was through the Latin version of Florence that the national and literary tradition of the school of Worcester made its way throughout the length and breadth of the land, and inspired a new generation of English historians. Simeon of Durham, copying out and piecing together the old Northumbrian annals which had gone on growing ever since Baeda's death, no sooner met with the chronicle of Florence than he made it the foundation of his own work for the whole space of time between AElfred's birth in 848 and Florence's own death in 1118; and from Simeon it was handed down, through the work of another local historian, to be incorporated in the great compilation of Roger of Howden. Henry of Huntingdon, who soon after 1125, at the instigation of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, began to collect materials for a history of the English, may have learnt from the same source his method of dealing with the English Chronicle, though he seems, naturally enough, to have chiefly used the copy which lay nearest to his own hand at Peterborough. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of England, a finer and subtler intellect than that of either Florence or Simeon or Henry had caught the historical impulse in an old West-Saxon monastery.

On Simeon, see Bishop Stubbs's preface to Roger of Howden, vol. i. ; Mr. Arnold's prefaces to Simeon, vol. i., and Henry of Huntingdon ; and Mr. Hodgson Hinde's preface to Simeon .

William of Malmesbury was born some three or four years before the Conqueror's death, in or near the little town in Wiltshire from which his surname was derived. One of his parents seems to have been Norman, the other English. They early destined their son to a literary career; "My father," he says, "impressed upon me that if I turned aside to other pursuits, I should but waste my life and imperil my good name. So, remembering the recommendation to make a virtue of necessity, I persuaded myself, young as I was, to acquire a willing taste for that to which I could not in honour show myself disinclined." It is plain that submission to the father's wishes cost no great effort to the boy. As he tells us himself, "Reading was the pleasure whose charms won me in my boyhood and grew with my growing years." His lot was cast in a pleasant place for one of such a disposition. Fallen though it was from its ancient greatness, some remnants of its earlier culture still hung about Malmesbury abbey. The place owed its rise to an Irish recluse, Maidulf, who, in the seventh century sought retirement from the world in the forest which at that time covered all the northern part of Wiltshire. Maidulf, however, was a scholar as well as a saint; and in those days, when Ireland was the light of the whole western world, no forest, were it never so gloomy and impenetrable, could long hide an Irish scholar from the eagerness of the disciples who flocked to profit by his teaching. The hermitage grew into a school, and the school into a religious community. Its second abbot, Ealdhelm, is one of the most brilliant figures in the history of early West-Saxon learning and culture. The architecture of Wessex owed its birth to the churches which he reared along the edge of the forest-tract of Dorset and Wiltshire, from the seat of his later bishopric at Sherborne to his early home at Malmesbury; its Latin literature was moulded by the learning which he brought back from Archbishop Theodore's school at Canterbury; and the whole ballad literature of southern England sprang from his English songs. The West-Saxon kings, from Ine to Eadgar, showered their benefactions upon the house of one whom they were proud to call their kinsman. It escaped as by a miracle from the destruction of the Danish wars; and in the Confessor's reign its wealth and fame were great enough to tempt the diocesan bishop, Herman of Ramsbury, into a project for making it the seat of his bishopric. Darker times began with the coming of the first Norman abbot, Turold, whose stern and warlike character, more befitting a soldier than a monk, soon induced the king to transfer him to Peterborough, as a check upon the English outlaws and their Danish allies in the camp of refuge at Ely. His successor at Malmesbury, Warin, alienated for his own profit the lands and the treasures which earlier benefactors had lavished upon the abbey, and showed his contempt for the old English abbots by turning the bones of every one of them, except Ealdhelm, out of their resting-places on either side the high altar, and thrusting them into a corner of one of the lesser churches of the town, with the mocking comment: "Whosoever is mightiest among them may help the rest!" William's boyhood, however, fell in happier days. About the time of his birth Warin died, and the next abbot, Godfrey, set himself to a vigorous work of material, moral and intellectual reform which must have been in full career when William entered the abbey-school. The bent of the lad's mind showed itself in the subjects which he chose for special study out of the general course taught in the school. "Logic, which serves to give point to our discourse, I tasted only with my ears; to physic, which cures the diseases of our bodies, I paid somewhat closer heed. But I searched deeply into the various branches of moral philosophy, whose dignity I hold in reverence, because it is self-evident to those who study it, and disposes our minds to virtuous living;--and especially into history, which, preserving in a pleasing record the manners of times gone by, by example excites its readers to follow that which is good and shun that which is evil." Young as he was, his studious habits gained him the confidence of the abbot. Godfrey's darling scheme was the formation of a library; and when at length he found time and means to attempt its execution, it was William who became his most energetic assistant. "Methinks I have a right to speak of this work," he tells us with pardonable pride, "for herein I came behind none of my elders, nay, if it be not boastful to say so, I far outstripped them all. I rivalled the good abbot's own diligence in collecting that pile of books; I did my utmost to help in his praiseworthy undertaking. May those who now enter into our labours duly cherish their fruits!"

It is not difficult to guess in what department of the library William took the deepest interest. Half Norman as he was by descent, the chosen literary assistant of a Norman abbot, it was natural that his first endeavour should be to "collect, at his own expense, some histories of foreign nations." As he pondered over them in the quiet cloisters of the old English monastery which by this time had become his home, the question arose--could nothing be found among our own people worthy of the remembrance of posterity? He had but to look around him, and the question answered itself. To the antiquary and the scholar Malmesbury was already classic ground, where every step brought him face to face with some memory of the glories of Wessex under the old royal house from which Ealdhelm sprang. To Ealdhelm's own fame indeed even the prejudices of Abbot Warin had been forced to yield, and a new translation of the saint's relics in 1078 had been followed by a fresh outburst of popular devotion and a fresh influx of pilgrims to his shrine. Every year his festival brought together a crowd of devotees, of sick folk seeking the aid of his miraculous powers, and--as generally happened in such cases--of low jesters seeking only to make their profit out of the amusement which they afforded to the gaping multitude. The punishment of one of these, who was smitten with frenzy and only cured after three days' intercession on the part of the monks, during which he lay chained before the shrine, was one of the most vivid recollections of William's childhood. In the vestiary of the abbey-church he beheld with wonder and awe the chasuble which, as a quaint legend told, the saint in his pious abstraction of mind had once hung upon a sunbeam, and whose unusual length helped to furnish a mental picture of his tall stately form. Among the older literary treasures which served as a nucleus for the new library, he gazed with scarcely less reverence on a Bible which Ealdhelm had bought of some foreign merchants at Dover when he visited Kent for his consecration. The muniment-chest was full of charters granted by famous kings of old, Ceadwalla and Ine, AElfred and Eadward, AEthelstan and Eadgar. In the church itself a golden crucifix, a fragment of the wood of the Cross, and several reliquaries containing the bones of early Gaulish saints were shown as AEthelstan's gifts, and the king himself lay buried beneath the tower. On the left of the high altar, facing S. Ealdhelm's shrine, stood a tomb which in William's day was believed to cover the remains of a scholar of wider though less happy fame than Ealdhelm himself--John Scotus, who, flying from his persecutors in Gaul, was said to have established a school under AElfred's protection at Malmesbury, and to have been there pricked to death by his pupils with their styles in the little church of S. Laurence. The scanty traces of a vineyard on the hill-side which sheltered the abbey to the north were associated with a visitor from a yet more distant land. In the time of the Danish kings there came seeking for admission at Malmesbury a stranger of whom the brotherhood knew no more than that he was a Greek and a monk, and that his name was Constantine. His gentle disposition, abstemious habits, and quiet retiring ways won him general esteem and love; his whole time was spent in prayer and in the cultivation of the vineyard which he planted with his own hands for the benefit of the community; and only when at the point of death he arrayed himself in a pallium drawn from the scrip which he always carried at his side, was it revealed to the astonished Englishmen that he had been an archbishop in his Eastern home.

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