the
Confessor.

The period of this new endowment was one well chosen to launch the
future glory of Westminster. England was all prepared to be permeated
with the Norman energy, and when immediately after the Conquest came,
the great shrine inherited all the glamour of a lost period, while it
established itself with the new power as a sort of symbol of the
continuity of the Crown. There William was anointed, there was his
palace and that of his son. When, with the next century, the seat of
Government became fixed, and London was finally established as the
capital, Westminster had already become the seat of the monarchy.

Chertsey, next up the river, took on the work. Like
Westminster--though, by tradition, a few years later than
Westminster--its foundation goes back to the birth of England. Its
history is known in some detail, and is full of incident, so that it
may be called the pivot upon which, presumably, turned the development
of the Thames Valley above London for two hundred years. Its site is
worth noting. The rich, but at first probably swampy, pasturage upon
the Surrey side was just such a position as one foundation after
another up and down England settled on. To reclaim land of this kind
was one of the special functions of the great abbeys, and Chertsey may
be compared in this particular to Hyde, for instance, or to the Vale
of the Cross, to Fountains, to Ripon, to Melrose, and to many others.
It was in the new order of monastic development what Staines, its
neighbour, had been in the old Roman order--the mark of the first
stage up-river from London.

The pagan storm which all but repeated in Britain the disaster of the
Saxon invasions, which all but overcame the mystic tenacity of Alfred
and the positive mission of the town of Paris, swept it completely.
Its abbot and its ninety monks were massacred, and it was not till
late in the next century, about 950, that it arose again from its
ruins. It was deliberately re-colonised again from Abingdon, and from
that moment onwards it grew again into power. Donations poured upon
it; one of them, not the least curious, was of land in Cardiganshire.
It came from those Welsh princes who were perpetually at war with the
English Crown: for religion was in those days what money is now--a
thing without frontiers--and it seemed no more wonderful to the Middle
Ages that an English monastery should collect its rents in an enemy's
land than it seems strange to us that the mo