He who considers the history of Westminster presently observes with surprise that he is reading about a city which has no citizens. In this respect Westminster is alone among cities and towns of the English-speaking race; she has had no citizens. Residents she has had,—tenants, lodgers, subjects, sojourners within her boundaries,—but no citizens. The sister city within sight, and almost within hearing, can show an unequaled roll of civic worthies, animated from the beginning by an unparalleled tenacity of purpose, clearly seeing and understanding what they wanted, and why, and how they could obtain their desire. This knowledge had been handed down from father to son. Freedom, self-government, corporations, guilds, brotherhoods, privileges, safety, and order—all have been achieved and assured by means of this tenacity and this clear understanding of what was wanted. Westminster has never possessed any of these things. For the City of London these achievements were rendered possible by the existence of one single institution: the Folk’s Mote—the Parliament of the People. Westminster never possessed that institution. The history of London is a long and dramatic panorama, full of tableaux, animated scenes, dramatic episodes, tragedies, and victories. In every generation there stands out one great citizen, strong and clear-eyed, whom the people follow: he is a picturesque figure, lifted high above the roaring, turbulent, surging crowd, whom he alone can govern. In Westminster there is no such citizen, and there is no such crowd. Only once in its history, until the eighteenth century, do we light upon the Westminster folk. Perhaps there have been, here and there, among them some mute inglorious Whittington—some unknown Gresham. Alas! there was no Folk’s Mote,—without a Folk’s Mote nothing could be done,—and so their possible leaders sank into the grave in silence and oblivion. Why was there no Folk’s Mote? Because the land on which Westminster stood, the land all around, north, west, south,—how broad a domain we shall presently discover,—belonged to the Church, and was ruled by the Abbot. Where the Abbot was king there was no room for the rule of the people.

Nor could there be any demand in Westminster for free institutions, because there were no trades and no industries. A wool staple there was, certainly, which fluctuated in importance, but was never to be compared with any of the great city trades. And Westminster was not a port; she had no quays or warehouses: neither exports nor imports—save only the wool—passed through her hands. There was no necessity at any time for the people who might at that time be her tenants to demand corporate action. Westminster has never attracted or invited immigrants or settlers.

Again, a considerable portion of those who lived in Westminster were criminals or debtors taking advantage of sanctuary. The privilege of sanctuary plays an important part in the history of Westminster. It is not, however, from sanctuary birds that one would expect a desire for order and free institutions. Better the rule of the Abbot with safety, than freedom of government and the certainty of gallows and whipping-post therewith.

We may consider that for five hundred years the Court and the Church, the Palace and the Abbey, divided between them the whole of Thorney Island. Until, therefore, the swamps were drained, there was no place—or a very narrow place—for houses and inhabitants on the south and west. Toward the north, between New Palace Yard and Charing Cross, houses began and grew, but quite slowly. Even so recently as the year 1755 the parish of St. Margaret’s had extended westward no farther than to include the streets called Pye Street, Orchard Street, Tothill Street, and Petty France, now York Street. King Street was the main street connecting Westminster with London by way of Charing Cross; and east and west of King Street, at the Westminster or southern end, was a network of narrow streets, courts, and slums, a few of which still exist to show what Westminster of the Tudors and the Stuarts used to be.

After the Dissolution—though the Dean succeeded the Abbot—there was some concession in the direction of popular government. The Dean still continued to be the over-lord. He appointed a High Sheriff, who in his turn appointed a Deputy; the city was divided into wards, in imitation of London, with a burgess to represent each ward. The court thus formed possessed considerable powers of police; but neither in authority, nor in power, nor in dignity, could such a chamber be compared with the Court of Aldermen of London. Edward VI. granted two members of Parliament to the City of Westminster.

Another reason which hindered the advance of the city in the last century was that the Dean and Chapter would neither sell their lands nor grant long leases. Therefore no one would build good houses, and the vicinity of the Abbey remained covered with mean tenements and populated by the scum and refuse.

For these reasons Westminster has had residents of all conditions—from king and noble to criminal and debtor. But it has had no citizens, no corporate life, no united action, no purpose. The City of London is a living whole: one would call its history the life of a man—the progress of a soul; the multitudinous crowd of separate lives rolls together and forms but one as the corporation grows greater, stronger, more free, with every century. But Westminster is an inert, lifeless form. Round the stately Abbey, below the noble halls, the people lie like sheep—but sheep without a leader. They have no voice; if they suffer, they have no cry; they have no aims; they have no ambition; without crafts, trades, mysteries, enterprise, distinctions, posts of honor, times of danger, liberties to defend, privileges to maintain, there may be thousands of men living in a collection of houses, but they are not citizens. In the pages that follow, therefore, we shall have little to do with the people of Westminster.

The following is Bardwell’s account of the original site of Westminster (“Westminster Improvements,” p. 8):

“Thorney Island is about 470 yards long and 370 yards broad, washed on the east side by the Thames, on the south by a rivulet running down College-street, on the north by another stream wending its way to the Thames down Gardener’s-lane: this and the College-street rivulet were joined by a moat called Longditch, forming the western boundary of Thorney Island, along the present line of Prince’s and De la Hay streets. This Island was the Abbey and Palace precinct, which, in addition to the water surrounding it, was further defended by lofty stone walls (part of which still remain in the Abbey gardens): in these walls were four noble gates, one in King-street, one near New Palace-yard (the foundations of which I observed in this month, Dec., 1838, in excavating for a new sewer), one opening into Tothill, or as it was called by William the First Touthull-street, and one at the mill by College-street. The precinct was entered by a bridge, erected by the Empress Maud, at the end of Gardener’s-lane in King-street, and by another bridge, still existing, though deep below the present pavement, at the east end of College-street.”

The beginning of city and abbey is an oft-told tale, but, as I shall try to show, a tale never truly and properly told. Antiquaries, or rather historians who have to depend on antiquaries, are apt to follow each other blindly. Thus, we are informed by everyone who has treated of this beginning, that the place on which Westminster Abbey stands was chosen deliberately as a fitting place for a monastic foundation, because of its seclusion, silence, and remoteness. “This spot,” writes the most illustrious among all the historians of the Abbey, when he has described the position of Thorney, “thus intrenched, marsh within marsh, forest within forest, was indeed locus terribilis—the terrible place, as it was called, in the first notices of its existence; yet, even thus early, it presented several points of attraction to the founder of whatever was the original building which was to redeem it from the wilderness. It had the advantages of a Thebaid as contrasted with the stir and tumult of the neighboring forest of London.”[1] And the same theory is adopted by Freeman, when he speaks of the site as “so near to the great city, and yet removed from its immediate throng and turmoil.” There is no doubt as to the meaning of both writers. The idea in their minds was of a place deliberately chosen by the founders of the first abbey, and adopted by Edward the Confessor as a wild, deserted, secluded place, difficult of access, remote from the ways of men, where in silence and peace the holy men might work and meditate. Let us examine into this assumption. The result, I venture to think, will upset many cherished opinions.

In the examination of ancient sites there are five principal things to ascertain before any conclusion is attempted—that is to say, before we attempt to restore the place as it was, or to identify it. The method which I began to learn twenty years ago, while following day by day Major Conder’s Survey of Palestine, and studying day by day his plans and drawings, his arguments and identifications, of a land which is one great field of ruins, I propose to apply to Thorney Island and the site of Westminster Abbey. These five points are: (1) the evidence of situation; (2) the evidence of excavation; (3) the evidence of ancient monuments, ruins, foundations, fragments; (4) the evidence of tradition; and (5) the evidence of history.

Let us take these several points in order.

1. Evidence of Situation.

The river Thames, which narrowed at London Bridge, began to widen out west of the mouth of the stream called the Fleet. There was a cliff or rising bank along the Strand, which confined the stream on its north bank as far as Charing. At this village the course of the river turned south, and, after half a mile, southwest. Here it formerly broadened into a vast marsh or lagoon, quite shallow to east and west, in parts only covered with water at high tide, and in parts rising above even the highest tides. This great marsh covered all the land known later as St. James’s Park, Tothill Fields, the Five Fields, Victoria, Earl’s Court, and part of Chelsea: on the other bank the marsh extended from Rotherhithe over Bermondsey, Southwark, Lambeth, Vauxhall, and part of Battersea. The places which here and there rose above the reach of flood were called islands; Bermond’s-ea—the Isle of Bermond; Chels-ea—the Isle of Shingle (Chesil); Thorn-ea—the Isle of Bramble; Batters-ea—the Isle of Peter. You may find little islands (eyots—aits) just like these higher up the river, such as Monkey Island, Eelpie Island, and so many others. No doubt, in very remote times, these little river islets were secluded places indeed; if any people lived upon them, they lived like the lake dwellers of Glastonbury, each family in its cottage planted down in the sedge and mud of the foreshore, resting on piles, with its floor of hard clay pressed down on timber, its walls of clay and wattle, its roof of rushes, its boat floating before the door. They trapped elk and deer and boar, they shot the wild fowl with their slings, they caught the salmon that swarmed in the river. Thorney, then, the site of the future abbey, the Isle of Bramble, was an islet entirely surrounded by the waters of a broad and shallow river. It was so broad that the backwater extended as far as the present site of Buckingham Palace. It was so shallow that at low tide a man could wade across from the rising ground of the west to the island, and from the island to the opposite shore, where is now St. Thomas’s Hospital.

This is the evidence of the natural situation, and so far all would be agreed.

2. Evidence of Excavation.

The kindly earth covers up and preserves many precious secrets,—“underground,” says Rabelais, “are all great treasures and wonderful things,”—to be revealed at some fitting time, when men’s minds shall be prepared to receive them. The earth preserves, for instance, the history of the ancient world—witness the revelations in our own time of the cuneiform tablets and the vast extension of the historic age: the arts of the ancient world, and their houses, and their manner of life—witness the revelations of Pompeii. Applied to Thorney, excavation has shown—what we certainly never could have known otherwise—that here, of all places in the world, in this little secluded islet in the midst of marshes (the most unlikely spot, one would think, in the whole of Britannia), there was a Roman station, and one of considerable importance. The first hint of this fact was suggested when there was dug up in the North Green of the Abbey, in the year 1869, a fine Roman sarcophagus inscribed with the name of Valerius Amandinus. The lid has a cross upon it, from which it has been conjectured that the sarcophagus was used twice, its second occupant having been a Christian. What reason, however, is there for supposing that Valerius Amandinus himself was not a Christian?—for, at least a century before the withdrawing of the Legions, Roman Britain was wholly Christian. For more than two centuries Christians had been numerous. During the fourth century the country was covered with monastic foundations for monks and nuns. Christian or not, there stands the sarcophagus of Valerius Amandinus, for all the world to see, at the entrance of the Chapter-house; and why a Roman cemetery should be established in Thorney no one could guess. But some ten years ago there was a second discovery. In digging a grave under the pavement of the nave, there was found a mosaic floor in very fair condition. This must have belonged to a Roman villa. But, if one villa, why not more? The question has been settled by the discovery, of late years, wherever the ground on Thorney has been opened, of Roman bricks and fragments of Roman buildings. It is now impossible to doubt the existence here of a Roman station.

That is, so far, the (unfinished) evidence of excavation.

But why did the Romans place a station, an important station, on this bit of a bramble-covered eyot, with a shallow river in front and a marshy backwater behind? What strategic importance could be attached to such a spot? The next branch of evidence will serve to answer the question.

3. Evidence of Ancient Monuments.

There are here none of those shapeless mounds of ancient ruins which are found elsewhere—as in Egypt. Nor are there any foundations above ground, as at Silchester. Yet there is one fact of capital importance, which not only serves to explain why the Romans established a station on Thorney, but also illustrates, as we shall see, many other facts in the history of the island. It is this:

The river from Thorney to the opposite shore, as we have seen, was fordable at low tide. The marsh, from Thorney to the rising ground on the west, was fordable probably at all tides—certainly at low tide.

This ford, the only one across the river for many miles up stream, belonged from time immemorial to the highway, a road or beaten track leading from the north of England to the south, and “tapping” the midland country on the way. The road which the Saxons called Watling Street, when it reached this neighborhood, ran straight down Park Lane, or Tyburn Lane, as it was formerly called, to the edge of the marsh. There it ended abruptly. If you will draw this line on any map, you will find that it ended at the western extremity of St. James’s Park, just about Buckingham Palace, where the marsh began. At this point the traveler plunged into the shallow waters, and guided by stakes, waded—at low tide there were, haply, stepping-stones—across the swamp to Thorney. Here, if the tide served, he again trusted himself to the guidance of stakes; and so, breast high, it may be, waded through the river till he reached the opposite shore, where another high road, “Dover Street,” which also broke off abruptly at this point, awaited him. Later on, when London Bridge was built, Watling Street was diverted at the spot where now stands the Marble Arch, was carried along the present Oxford Street and Holborn, and passed through the City to the Bridge. This alternative route probably took away a great deal of the traffic: but for those who had business in the south or the southwest, or for those who were bound for the port of Dover, the ford was still preferred as the shorter way. A bridge was convenient, but the traveler of the fourth century was accustomed to a ford. Those who had no business in London were not likely to be turned out of their way by another ford, after they had crossed so many.

The highroad between the north and south, the great highway into which were poured streams from all the other ways, passed through this double ford, and over the Isle of Bramble. This was not a highway passing through a wild and savage country; on the contrary, Britain was a country, in the two latter centuries of the Roman occupation, thickly populated, covered with great cities and busy towns. No one who has stood within the walls of Silchester, and has marked the foundations of its great hall, larger than Westminster Abbey, the remains of its corridors and courts and shops, the indications of wealth and luxury furnished by its villas, the extent of its walls, can fail to understand that the vanished civilization of Roman Britain was very far superior to anything that followed for a good deal more than a thousand years. It was more artistic, more luxurious, than the Saxon or the Norman life. But it was essentially Roman. Civilized Rome could not be understood by Western Europe until the fifteenth century. Roman Britain is only beginning to

be understood by ourselves. We have not as yet realized how much was swept away and lost when, after two centuries of fighting, the Britons were driven to their mountains, with the loss of the old arts and learning. All over the country were the great houses, the stately villas, of a rich, cultured, and artistic class; all over the country were rich cities, filled with people who desired, and had, all the things that made life tolerable in Rome herself. The condition of Bordeaux in the fourth century, her schools, her professors, her poets, her orators, her lawyers, may suggest the condition of London, and in a less degree that of many smaller cities.

If we bear these things in mind, I think we shall understand that the roads must have been everywhere crowded and thronged by the long processions of packhorses and mules engaged in supplying the various wants of this people, bringing food supplies to the cities, wines and foreign luxuries to the unwarlike people who were doomed before long to fall before the ruder and stronger folk of the Frisian speech. For our purpose it is sufficient to note that it was a country where the wants of the better sort created, by themselves, a vast trade; where, in addition, the exports were large and valuable; and where the traffic of the highways was very great and never-ending.

In other words, this wild and desolate spot, chosen, we are told, as a fitting site for a monastery because of its remoteness and its seclusion, was, long before a monastery was built here, the scene of a continual procession of those who journeyed south and those who journeyed north. It was a halting-and resting-place for a stream of travelers who never stopped all the year around. By way of Thorney passed the merchants, with their hides bestowed upon their packhorses, going to embark them at Dover: London had not yet gathered in all the trade of the country. By way of Thorney they drove the long strings of slaves to be sold in Gaul. By way of Thorney passed the legions on their way north; craftsmen, traders, mimes, actors, musicians, dancers, jugglers, on their way to the towns of Glevum, Corinium, Eboracum, and the rest. Always, day after day, even night after night, there was the clamor of those who came and those who went: such a clamor as used to belong, for instance, to the courtyard of an old-fashioned inn, in and out of which there lumbered the loaded wagon, grinding heavily over the stones; the stage-coach, the post-chaise, the merchant’s rider on his nag—all with noise. The Isle of Bramble was like that courtyard: outside the Abbey it was a great inn, a halting-place, a bustling, noisy, frequented place; the center, before London, the mart of Britannia; no “Thebaid” at all; no quiet, secluded, desolate place, but the center of the traffic of the whole island. And it remained a busy place long after London Bridge was built, long after the Port of London had swallowed up all the other ports in the country. When the river, by means of embankments, was forced into narrower and deeper channels, the ford disappeared.

By this time the backwater and the marsh had been dried, and the traveler could walk dry-shod from the end of Watling Street to the Isle of Bramble. Perhaps, it may be objected, solitude descended upon the island, and the silence of desertion, with the deepening of the channel. Not so; for now another highway had been created—the highway up the river. The growth of London created the necessity for this

highway. From the western country all the exports came down the river to the Port of London: from the Port of London all the import trade went up the river to the west of England. At the flow of the tide the deeply laden barges, like our own, but narrower, went up the river; at the ebb they went down. Going up, the barges carried spices, wines, silks, glass, candles, lamps, hangings, pictures, statuary, books, church furniture, and all the foreign luxuries that were now necessary in the British city; going down they were laden with pelts and wool. The slaves, which formed so large a part of British export, not only at this period, but later, under the Saxons, were marched along the highway. There were also the barges laden with fruit, vegetables, grain, poultry, wild birds, carcasses, for that wide London mouth which continually devoured and daily called for more. And there were the fishermen casting their nets for the salmon in the season, and for the other fish with which the river, its waters clean and wholesome, teemed all the year round. Full and various was the life upon the river. Always there was traffic, always movement, always activity, and always noise—much noise. A great noise: where boatmen are there is always noise; they exchange the joke Fescennine, they laugh, they quarrel, they fight, they sing. To the Benedictine monks the river presented the spectacle of a procession as noisy and as animated as that which in the old days had made a stepping-stone of the island from one ford to the other. In short, there was never any time, from the beginning of the Roman occupation to the present day, when the Isle of Bramble was a quiet, secluded, desolate spot. Always crowded, bustling, and noisy. Why should not a Benedictine monastery be planted in the midst of the people? The Rule of Benedict was not the Rule of Robert of Citeaux. Two hundred years later, when the Priory of the Holy Trinity was founded, did they place the monastery in the wilds of Sheppey, or in the marshes of the Isle of Dogs, or on lonely Canvey? Not at all: they placed it within London Wall—at Aldgate, the busiest place in the City. And the Franciscans, were they exiled to some remote quarter? Not at all: they were established within the walls. So were Austin Friars and the Crutched Friars; while White Friars and Black Friars were close to the City wall. And even the austere Carthusians were within hearing of the horse fairs, the races, the tournaments, and the sports of the citizens upon the field called Smooth. Nor does it ever appear that the monks were dissatisfied with their position, and craved for solitude; they preferred the din and roar of the noisiest city in the habitable world.

So that, by the evidence of natural situation, by the evidence of excavation, and by the evidence of ancient monuments, we understand that the Isle of Bramble was a Roman station, the point where the highway of the north met the highway of the south—the very heart of Britannia, the center of all internal communication, the place by which, until London gathered all into her lap, the whole traffic of the island must pass. Before London existed, Thorney had become a place of the greatest importance; long after London had become a rich and busy port, Thorney, the stepping-stone in the middle of the ford, continued its old importance and its activity. Never a place of trade, but always a place of passing traffic, its population was great, but as ephemeral as the May-fly: its people came, rested a night, a day, an hour, and were gone again.

4. We have next the Evidence of Tradition.

According to this authority we learn that the first Christian king was one Lucius, who in the year 178 addressed a letter to the then Pope, Eleutherius, begging for missionaries to instruct his people and himself in the Christian faith. The Pope sent two priests named Ffagan and Dyfan, who converted the whole island. Bede tells this story; the old Welsh chroniclers also tell it, giving the British name of the king, Lleurwg ap Coel ap Cyllin. He it was who erected a church on the Isle of Bramble, in place of a temple of Apollo formerly standing there. We remember also that St. Paul’s was said to have been built on the site of a temple of Diana.

This church continued in prosperity until the arrival, two hundred and fifty years later, of the murderous Saxons. First, news came up the river that the invader was on the Isle of Rum, which we call Thanet; next, that he held the river; that he had overrun Essex; that he had overrun Kent. And then the procession of merchandise stopped suddenly. The ports of Kent were in the hands of the enemy. There was no more traffic on Watling Street. The travelers grew fewer daily; till one day a troop of wild Saxons came across the ford, surprised the priests and the fisher-folk who remained, and left the island as desolate and silent as could be desired for the meditation of holy men. This done, the Saxons went on their way. They overran the midland country; they drove the Britons back—still farther back, till they reached the mountains. No more news came to Thorney, for, though the ford continued, the island, like so many of the Roman stations, remained a waste Chester.

In fullness of time the Saxon king himself settled down, became a man of peace, obeyed the order of

the convert king to be baptised and to enter the Christian faith; and when King Sebert had been persuaded to build a church to St. Paul on the highest ground of London, he was further convinced that it was his duty to restore the ruined church of St. Peter on the Isle of Thorney beside the ford. Scandal indeed would it be, were the throng that daily passed through the ford and over the island to see, in a Christian country, the neglected ruins of this Christian church. Accordingly the builders soon set to work, and before long the church rose tall and stately. The Miracle of the Hallowing, often told, may be repeated here. On the eve of the day fixed by the Bishop of London for the hallowing and dedication of the new St. Peter’s, one Edric, a fisherman, who lived in Thorney, was awakened by a loud voice calling him by name. It was midnight. He rose and went forth. The voice called him again, from the opposite side of the river, which is now Lambeth, bidding him put out his boat to ferry a man across the river. He obeyed. He found on the shore a venerable person whose face and habilaments he knew not. The stranger bore in his hands certain vessels which Edric knew could only be intended for church purposes. However, he said nothing, but received this mysterious visitor into his boat and rowed him across the river. Arrived in Thorney, the stranger directed his steps to the church, and entered the portal. Straightway—lo! a marvel!—the church was lit up as by a thousand wax tapers, and voices arose chanting psalms—sweet voices such as no man, save this rude fisherman, had ever heard before. He stood and listened. The voices, he perceived, could be none other than those of angels come down from heaven itself to sing the first service in the new church. Then the voices fell, and he heard one voice, loud and solemn; and then the heavenly choir uplifted their voices again. Presently all was still; the service was over, the lights went out as suddenly as they had appeared, and the stranger came forth.

“Know, O Edric,” he said, while the fisherman’s heart glowed within him, “know that I am Peter. I have hallowed the church myself. To-morrow I charge thee that thou tell these things to the Bishop, who will find a sign and token in the church of my hallowing. And for another token, put forth again, upon the river, cast thy nets, and thou shalt receive so great a draught of fishes that there will be no doubt left in thy mind. But give one-tenth to this, my holy church.”

So he vanished; and the fisherman was left alone upon the river bank. But he put forth as directed, cast his net, and presently brought ashore a draught miraculous.

In the morning the Bishop with his clergy, and the King with his following, came up from London in their ships to hallow the church. They were received by Edric, who told them this strange story. And within the church the Bishop found the lingering fragrance of incense far more precious than any that he could offer; on the altar were the drippings of wax candles (long preserved as holy relics, being none other than the wax candles of heaven), and written in the dust certain words in Greek character. He doubted no longer. He proclaimed the joyous news; he held a service of thanksgiving instead of a hallowing. Who would not hold a service of praise and humble gratitude for such a mark of heavenly favor? And after service they returned to London and held a banquet, with Edric’s finest salmon lying on a lordly dish in the midst.

How it was that Peter, who came from heaven direct, could not cross the river except in a boat, was never explained or asked. Perhaps we have here a little confusion between Rome and heaven. Dover Street, we know, broke off at the edge of the marsh, and Dover Street led to Dover, and Dover to Rome.

5. We are now prepared for the Evidence of History, which is not perhaps so interesting as that of tradition. Clio, it must be confessed, is sometimes dull. One misses the imagination and the daring flights of her sister, the tenth Muse—the Muse of Fiction. The earliest document which refers to the Abbey is a conveyance by Offa, King of Mercia, of a manor called Aldenham, to “St. Peter and the people of the Lord dwelling in Thorney, that ‘terrible’—i. e., sacred—place which is called at Westminster.” The date of this ancient document is A.D. 785; but Bede, who died in 736, does not mention the foundation. Either, therefore, Bede passed it over purposely, or it was not thought of importance enough to be mentioned. He does relate the building of St. Paul’s; but, on the other hand, he does not mention the hundreds of churches which sprang up all over the country. So that we need not attach any importance to the omission. My own opinion is that the church—a rude country church, perhaps a building like that of Greenstead, Essex, the walls of split trees and the roof of rushes—was restored early in the seventh century, and that it did succeed an earlier church still. The traditional connection of King Sebert with the church is as ancient as anything we know about it, and the legend of Lucius and his church is at least supported by the recent discoveries of Roman remains, and the certainty that the place was always of the greatest importance.

There is another argument—or an illustration—in favor of the antiquity of some church, rude or not, upon this place. I advance it as an illustration, though to myself it appears to be an argument: I mean the long list of relics possessed by the Abbey at the Dedication of the year 1065. We are not concerned with the question whether the relics were genuine or not, but merely with the fact that they were preserved by the monks as having been the gifts of various benefactors—Sebert, Offa, Athelstan, Edgar, Ethelred, Cnut, Queen Emma, and Edward himself. A church of small importance and of recent building would not dare to parade such pretensions. It takes time even for forgeries to gain credence and for legends to grow. The relics ascribed to Sebert and Offa could easily have been carried away on occasion

of attack. As for the nature of these sacred fragments, it is pleasant to read of sand and earth brought from Mounts Sinai and Olivet, of the beam which supported the holy manger, of a piece of the holy manger, of frankincense presented by the Magi, of the seat on which our Lord was presented at the Temple, of portions of the holy cross presented by four kings at different times, of bones and vestments belonging to apostles and martyrs and the Virgin Mary and saints without number, whose very names are now forgotten. In the cathedral of Aix you may see just such a collection as that which the monks of St. Peter displayed before the reverent eyes of the Confessor. We may remember that in the ninth and tenth centuries the rage for pilgrimizing extended over the whole of Western Europe: pilgrims crowded every road; they marched in armies, and they returned laden with treasures—water from the Jordan, sand from Sinai, clods of earth from Gethsemane, and bones and bits of sacred wood without number. When Peter the Hermit arose to preach it was but putting a match to a pile ready to be fired. But for such a list as that preserved by history, there was need of time as well as credulity.

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.

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.

These are the beginnings of the Abbey and the Church, and of life upon the Island of Bramble. This the foundation of the history that follows. A busy place before London Bridge was built; a place of throng and turmoil far back in the centuries before the coming of the Roman; a church built in the midst of the throng; monks in leather jerkins living beside the church; a ruined church lying in ruins for two hundred years, while the Saxon infidel daily passed beside it across the double ford; then a rebuilding—why not by Sebert? Another destruction, and another rebuilding.

This view is often taken by Loftie in his “Westminster Abbey.” He does not, however, defend it and insist upon it so strongly. He says, to quote his exact words: “The hillock on which we stand is called Thorn-Ey. There are some Roman remains on it, and there may have been the ruins of a little monastery and chapel, of which floating traditions were afterward gathered and exaggerated. The paved causeway to the westward is the Watling Street. On both sides of it runs the Tyburn, of which Thorn-Ey is a kind of delta. The road rises to Tot Hill, which is a conspicuous landmark here, and goes straight on over the ‘Bulunga Fen’ till it reaches another, the ‘road to Reading,’ which has just crossed the Tyburn at Cowford, where Brick Street is now in Piccadilly. From Thorney, then, looking northward and westward, we see what remains of the great Middlesex forest, if the Danes have not burnt it all, and the paved Watling Street running straight on toward the distant Chester, keeping to the left of the lofty hill which is now crowned by the town of Hampstead. It is interesting to trace this ancient road through the modern streets, the more so as its existence determined the site and early importance of Westminster. When it emerged from the wild woods of Northern Middlesex and came down toward the ford of the Thames, it followed what we call the Edgeware Road, Edgeware being the name of the first stopping-place on the road, near the edge of the forest. Passing down the Edgeware Road in a straight line, it is interrupted at the Marble Arch by a corner of the Park, which crosses the direct road toward Westminster. We know, however, that this corner is a comparatively recent addition to the Park, and the Watling Street soon resumes its course in Park Lane, which, keeping well on the high ground above the brook, nevertheless derived the name it was known by for many centuries from the Tyburn. Tyburn Lane reached the road to Reading at what we call Hyde Park Corner, and then ran straight through what was once called ‘Brookshott,’—a little wood, where now is the Green Park and the gardens of Buckingham Palace,—and on, right through the site of the palace itself, where the brook approached it very closely. So it descended to Tothill, the name of which has been plausibly explained to mean a place where the traveler ‘touted’ for a guide or a boat, as the case might be, for the dangerous ford of the Thames below. This is rather conjectural, but is not to be rejected until a better explanation has been offered. One thing more had to be stated about this ancient highway—the Watling Street. How is it that we find the same name in the City? To answer this question we must look back to a period so remote that we cannot accurately date it, yet so definite, in one way, that there can be no mistake about it. This is the time at which London Bridge was built. When that great event took place Watling Street was diverted from Tyburn Lane, and instead of going to Westminster in order to ford the Thames, it turned to the left, along the modern Oxford Street and Holborn, and, entering the City at Newgate, went on to the bridge. Only a small part of the road still bears the ancient name, but that any of it does so is a most interesting and significant fact.

“We may conclude, therefore, if we wish to do so, that in a sense Westminster is older than London itself. What name it was called by we know not; but the Romans certainly had a station here, as I have said, and the importance of the place before the making of London Bridge may have been considerable.”

In course of time the river was embanked, and ran in a deeper channel; then the ford, as has been stated above, vanished, and the marshes were partly reclaimed, only pools remaining on both sides of the river—the Southwark pools remained till the beginning of this century. But Thorney, after the drying of the marsh, continued to be an island. On the north, the west, and the south sides it was bounded by streams; on the east by the Thames. If you will take the map, and draw a line through Gardener’s Lane across King Street to the river, you will be tracing the exact course of the rivulet which ran into the Thames and formed the northern boundary of the island; another line, down Great College Street, marks the course of a second stream; while a third line, down De la Hay and Prince’s Streets, joining the other two, marks the lie of a connecting canal called Long Ditch. It is interesting to walk along the narrow Gardener’s Lane, one of the few remaining old streets of Westminster, and to mark how the road presents a certain unmistakable look of having been the bed of a stream; it bends and curves exactly like a stream. The same thing may be imagined—by a person of imagination—concerning Great College Street.

The island thus formed covered an area of four hundred and seventy yards long from north to south, and three hundred and seventy yards broad from east to west. At some time or other—after the disappearance of the ford—the Abbey precinct was surrounded by a wall. In the same way St. Paul’s, in the midst of the City, was surrounded by a wall with embattled gates. A portion of this wall is perhaps still standing. The wall was pierced by four gates. One of these was in King Street, where the rivulet crossed; one was at the east end of Tothill Street; a third was in Great College Street, and its modern successor still stands on the spot with no ancient work in it; the last was in New Palace Yard. In front of the riverside wall lived the population of Thorney,—the town of Westminster, such as it was,—decayed indeed since the deepening of the river: fisher-folk mostly, who plied their trade on the river. But of town or village, in the time of Edward the Confessor, there was little or none.

When the old Palace of Westminster was founded, another wall was erected round its buildings. Then the island was completely surrounded by a fortification; the fisher-folk removed northward and settled somewhere lower down the river, where afterward arose the New Palace and Whitehall; not higher up, where the ground continued to be a marsh for many centuries to come. We have seen the beginnings of the Church and of the Abbey. What were the beginnings of the Palace? When did a king begin to live on Thorney Island? And why?

Since neither tradition nor history speaks to the contrary, we may suppose that Cnut was the first to build some kind of palace or residence in this place. His buildings are said to have been burned in the time of Edward; therefore he must have built something. His residence on Thorney was neither continuous nor at any time of long duration. The court of the kings for many generations to come was a Court Itinerant. King Cnut traveled perpetually from place to place, followed by his regiment of house carles, though one knows not how many accompanied him. He stayed at Thorney because he loved the conversation of the Abbot Wolfstan. It was at Thorney that, according to the familiar story, he rebuked the courtiers in the matter of the rising tide; and it was in the concluding years of his reign, when that marvelous change, graphically described by Freeman, fell upon him, and he became exactly the opposite of what he had before shown himself; when he founded and endowed and augmented churches and monasteries. His heart was changed: the stately services of the minster, the rolling of the organ, the chanting of the monks, the splendor of the altar, the story of the Gospel, the legends and the acts of the Saints, the pilgrimage to Rome,—these things pleased him more than the clash of steel on shield, the war cry, and the glorious madness of the fight. The beginner of the old Palace was the great King Cnut the Dane.

We write under the shadow of the Abbey: the bells peal out over our heads; the organ swells and dies; within the walls are the coffins and the bones of dead kings and princes and nobles. The air is ecclesiastic: we may talk of changed hearts and repentant age. The age of civil wars, intestine wars,—the worst wars of all, the wars of those who speak the same language,—lasted for five hundred years after the death of King Cnut. We who belong to a generation which has learned some self-control, cannot realize the intensity, the strength of the passions which devoured and maddened the kings of old. The things which make history dreadful: the murders, the cry to arms at the least provocation; the cruel disregard of innocent suffering; the wasting, pillaging, destroying of lands and fields and villages and towns, in blind revenge; the blinding and torturing and maiming of which every page is full, these things mean the rage of kings, the revenge of kings upon their enemies. Cnut in his last years had no enemies; he had killed them all. Then there were no more rages; he suffered his head to dwell upon nobler things—in modern language, he “got religion.” And so, at the end of this Prologue to the Westminster Play, we see the King taking off his blood-stained ermine, laying down the sword which has set free so many unwilling souls, and walking in meditation and godly discourse under the quiet cloisters of the Abbey. Outside, the noisy court and camp; within, the calm and peace of the religious life. The picture strikes a note of what is to follow when we pass into the period of history written from day to day, and draw up the curtain for the Pageant, Mystery, or Play of Westminster.