one," and bade him decide. The bishop accepted the
responsibility, reminded them of the grief which arose when St. Benedict
sent forth St. Maur to Western Gaul, and exhorted Hugh that the Son of
God had left the deepest recess of His Deity to be manifest for the
salvation of many. "You too must pilgrimage for a little time from your
dearest, breaking for a while the silence of the quiet you have loved."
After much interruption from Hugh, the sentence was given. They all
kissed him and sent him away forthwith. The king received him with much
graciousness and ordered him to be carried honourably to Witham, and the
wretched remnant in the mud flat received him as an angel of God. Well
they might do so, for they seemed to have passed a melancholy winter in
twig huts, now called "weeps," in a little paled enclosure, not only
without the requisites of their order, but with barely bread to their
teeth. There was no monastery, not even a plan of one. William FitzJohn
and his clayey serfs scowled upon the shivering interlopers, uncertain
what injustice might be done to them and to their fathers' homes, in
sacrifices to the ghost of St. Thomas.

Witham is a sort of glorified soup-plate, still bearing traces of its
old Selwood Forest origin, for the woodlands ring round it. The infant
river Avon creeps through its clayey bottom, and there are remains of
the old dams which pent it into fish-ponds. Of the convent nothing
remains except a few stumps in a field called "Buildings," unless the
stout foundations of a room, S.E. of the church, called the
reading-room, mark the guest house, as tradition asserts. Much of the
superstructure of this cannot go back beyond the early sixteenth
century, but the solid walls, the small size (two cottage area), allow
of the fancy that here was the site of many colloquies between our Hugh
and Henry Fitz-Empress.{1}

The church itself is one of the two erected by St. Hugh, partly with his
own hands. It is the lay brothers' church (called since pre-Franciscan
days, the Friary). The conventual church has left no wrack behind. The
style is entirely Burgundian, a single nave, with Romanesque windows,
ending in an apse. The "tortoise" roof, of vaulted stone, is as lovely
as it is severe. In 1760 the Tudor oaken bell-turret survived. The
horrid story of how a jerry-built tower was added and the old
post-Hugonian font built into it, how a new font was after long
interval added, does not concern us. The towe