ow chose a safer position for the new foundation, for the river at
Romsey was too shallow to allow of the seagoing vessels of the marauding
Danes to reach it. Eadward's eldest daughter AElflaed and her sister
AEthelhild both adopted the religious life, and lived for a time at the
monastery at Wilton. Here AEthelhild was buried, while AElflaed was buried at
Romsey. Their half-sister St. Eadburh became abbess of St. Mary's Abbey at
Winchester; and it is highly probable that AElflaed ruled as abbess over the
sister establishment at Romsey. Probably this was only a small religious
community. Whether it was continued or not when she died no record remains
to tell, but, as we have seen, it was refounded by Eadgar the Peaceable in
967, and on Christmas day of the year 974 St. Meriwenna was put in charge
of the completed Abbey, which was constituted according to the Benedictine
Rule. Some traces of this church still remain, though only discovered in
1900. Under the pavement of the present church, immediately below the
tower, the foundations of an apsidal east ending of a church were found;
now as it is well known that this is a Norman form for the east end, it
must not be supposed that this apse was built in the time of Eadgar, but
it very probably occupied the same position as the choir of his church.
Other foundations were then looked for and found. And as a result of this
investigation, it appears that the nave of Eadgar's church extended as far
to the west as the fourth bay of the present nave, that its crossing lay
immediately to the west of the present transept, and that the apsidal
choir was as wide as the present nave, and extended eastward as far as the
screen now dividing the choir from the transept. Thus the total interior
length of the church was about 90 ft. instead of about 220 ft., the length
of the present building. Although the church was comparatively small,
Eadgar made provision in the domestic buildings for one hundred nuns, a
number rarely exceeded in after days. Peter de Langtoft, a canon of
Bridlington who died early in the fourteenth century, writing of Eadgar
says:

Mikille he wirschiped God, and served our Lady;
The Abbey of Romege he feffed richely
With rentes full gode and kirkes of pris,
He did ther in of Nunnes a hundreth ladies.

Eadgar's church, however, was not destined to last long. Early in the year
1003, according to one of the few legends connected with the abbey, the
form o