bbey would not have been adequate to defray the expences of the
new building, had not Abbot Robert, who, in 1050, had been translated to
the see of Canterbury, supplied the deficiency by his munificence, and,
as long as he continued to be an English prelate, remitted the surplus
of his revenues to the Norman abbey. He held his archiepiscopal dignity
only one year, at the expiration of which he was banished from England:
he then retired to Jumieges, where he died the following spring, and was
buried in the choir of the church which he had begun to raise. At his
death, the church had neither nave nor windows; and the whole edifice
was not completed till November, in the year 1066. In the following July
the dedication took place. Maurilius, Archbishop of Rouen, officiated,
in great pomp, assisted by all the prelates of the duchy; and William,
then just returned from the conquest of England, honored the ceremony
with his presence.

I have dwelt upon the early history of this monastery, because Normandy
scarcely furnishes another of greater interest. In the _Neustria Pia_,
Jumieges fills nearly seventy closely-printed folio pages of that
curious and entertaining, though credulous, work.--What remains to be
told of its annals is little more than a series of dates touching the
erection of different parts of the building: these, however, are worth
preserving, so long as any portion of the noble church is permitted to
have existence, and so long as drawings and engravings continue to
perpetuate the remembrance of its details.

The choir and extremities of the transept, all of pointed architecture,
are supposed to have been rebuilt in 1278.--The Lady-Chapel was an
addition of the year 1326.--The abbey suffered materially during the
wars between England and France, in the reigns of our Henry IVth and
Henry Vth: its situation exposed it to be repeatedly pillaged by the
contending parties; and, were it not that the massy Norman architecture
sufficiently indicates the true date, and that we know our neighbors'
habit of applying large words to small matters, we might even infer that
it was then destroyed as effectually as it had been by Ironside: the
expression, "lamentabiliter desolata, diffracta et annihilata," could
scarcely convey any meaning short of utter ruin, except to the ears of
one who had been told that a religious edifice was actually _abime_
during the revolution, though he saw it at the same moment standing
before him,