ry with its thirty or forty hides
of land to Wilfrid and his retention of them after his elevation to the
see of Northumbria.

The connection of the monastery with the Archbishop is illustrated in
the reign of Athelstan's brother Eadred, when Archbishop Wulfstan, by
aiding a rebellion for the purpose of again setting up a Danish king at
York, drew down the royal anger upon Ripon. In 948 (or 950, according to
one authority) Eadred harried Northumbria, and then, says the Worcester
Chronicle, "was that famed minster burned at Ripon, which St. Wilfrid
built." Wulfstan himself was deprived and imprisoned.

About two years later the half-ruined and deserted church was visited
(the see of York being vacant) by Oda, Archbishop of Canterbury. There
was a tradition in the sixteenth century that he rebuilt it, but his
visit is also memorable for another tradition, namely, that he
translated the bones of St. Wilfrid to Canterbury. Hence arose a fierce
dispute between Canterbury and Ripon, each claiming that it possessed
the body of the Saint. The claim of Canterbury, which is accepted to
this day by the Church of Rome, is supported by the assertion of Oda
himself, and by several subsequent chroniclers, one of whom, however,
attributes the translation to St. Dunstan, while another goes so far as
to concede that Oda left a portion of the bones behind. But Ripon always
maintained that it possessed the whole, and that the relics removed had
been those of Wilfrid II. (Archbishop of York, 718-732). According to
the contemporary biographer of Oswald (Archbishop of York, 972-992) the
bones of the Saint were at Ripon in the tenth century, and Oswald
solemnly enshrined them--whence that feast of St. Wilfrid's translation
which was afterwards kept on the 24th of April; and a later chronicler
speaks of "the body of the blessed Wilfrid" as being at Ripon in the
reign of Stephen. The claim of Canterbury was forgotten for a time in
the glories of St. Thomas a Becket, while that of Ripon became more or
less established in the north. In 1224 Archbishop de Gray, who
translated the alleged relics at Ripon to a more splendid shrine,
declared that he had found the skeleton complete. In the fifteenth
century Henry V. himself writes to Ripon of his reverence for "St.
Wilfrid, buried in the said church." In the sixteenth, Leland, while
recording a common opinion that Oda rebuilt the minster, makes no
mention of any removal of the relics. The controversy