t features of the scene would
have been all familiar. He would have lived in a cell of the same shape,
he would have thought the same thoughts, spoken the same words in the
same language. The prayers, the daily life, almost the very faces with
which he was surrounded, would have seemed all unaltered. A thousand
years of the world's history had rolled by, and these lonely islands of
prayer had remained still anchored in the stream; the strands of the
ropes which held them, wearing now to a thread, and very near their last
parting, but still unbroken. What they had been they were; and, if
Maurice Channey's description had come down to us as the account of the
monastery in which Offa of Mercia did penance for his crimes, we could
have detected no internal symptoms of a later age.

[Sidenote: Channey's description of it.]

His pages are filled with the old familiar stories of visions and
miracles; of strange adventures befalling the chalices and holy
wafers;[425] of angels with wax candles; innocent phantoms which
flitted round brains and minds fevered by asceticism. There are accounts
of certain _fratres reprobi et eorum terribilis punitio_--frail brethren
and the frightful catastrophes which ensued to them.[426] Brother
Thomas, who told stories out of doors, _apud saeculares_, was attacked
one night by the devil; and the fiend would have strangled him but for
the prayers of a companion. Brother George, who craved after the
fleshpots of Egypt, was walking one day about the cloister when he ought
to have been at chapel, and the great figure upon the cross at the end
of the gallery turned its back upon him as it hung, and drove him all
but mad. Brother John Daly found fault with his dinner, and said that he
would as soon eat toads--_Mira res! Justus Deus non fraudavit eum
desiderio suo_--his cell was for three months filled with toads. If he
threw them into the fire, they hopped back to him unscorched; if he
killed them, others came to take their place.

[Sidenote: Character of Haughton, the prior.]

But these bad brothers were rare exceptions. In general the house was
perhaps the best ordered in England. The hospitality was well sustained,
the charities were profuse, and whatever we may think of the intellect
which could busy itself with fancies seemingly so childish, the monks
were true to their vows, and true to their duty as far as they
comprehended what duty meant. Among many good, the prior John Haughton
was the be