w resting in their sumptuous
shrine. When the Norman came, and the new order was set up in the
land--not a day before it was needed--the thirteenth Abbot of St.
Alban's was of the blood royal, and heir, they said, to Cnut, the Danish
king, who had passed away. It was to him that the awful Conqueror made
oath he would bind himself by the Confessor's laws, an oath which, if he
ever meant to keep, he meant to interpret according to his mood. Even
the very laxity and shortcomings of the abbots of generations back,
which tradition, and something more to be trusted than tradition,
declared to have been matters of scandal, proved no more than that the
great Abbey could live through evil times, outride the storms which
would wreck weaker vessels, and right itself, though overloaded with
abuses which timid pilots would have shrunk from throwing overboard: and
now that 400 years had passed since Offa, the Saxon king--(stirred
thereto by Karl, the Emperor)--had founded the monastery in St. Alban's
honour, and from generation to generation vast building operations had
been going on almost without interruption, and the old Abbey still held
up its head proudly, its Abbot taking precedence of every other in the
land; any man might be excused for thinking that to become a monk of St.
Alban's Abbey was to become a personage of no small consideration.

Verily it was a great abbey in the days of King John. There, in the
eighth year of that King's reign, was held that memorable council
which, if it had been let alone, would doubtless have issued its protest
against the intolerable aggression of the Pope and his _curia_. There,
six years afterwards, another assembly was convened; the first occasion
on which we find any historical proof that representatives were summoned
to a national council in England. Eight times during his reign the
ruffian King was himself a guest at the Abbey. Once after John's death,
when Louis was desperately struggling to hold his own against young
Henry's friends and supporters, he too came to St. Alban's, and
threatened to give it over to fire and sword: only money saved it from a
sack. There was always something to take, and yet always wonderful state
kept up. The magnates in Church and State were for ever going in and
out; the mere domestic expenditure was enormous. Yet, even when the
country was groaning under horrible anarchy, and grinding taxation, and
war and poverty, the building went on as if men lived only