It seems to have been hewn
bodily out of the cliffs or the great hills.
It is enormously old. The house was founded or perhaps refounded more
than a millennium ago by Edward the Elder in 907; his daughter was
abbess here, and here was buried. In 967 Edgar his grandson gave the
house to the Benedictines. It remained English after the Conquest, for
William seems not to have dealt with it and in 1086 the sister of Edgar
Atheling became abbess. Out of it Henry I. chose his bride that
Abbess's niece Maud a novice of Our Lady of Romsey. Said I not well
that it was as the foundation of England?
We know little of the Abbey for near a hundred years after that, and
then in 1160 the daughter of King Stephen, Mary, whose uncle, Henry of
Blois, was Bishop of Winchester, became abbess, and it was decided to
rebuild the place. Thus the great Norman church we have, arose in the
new England of the twelfth century. Mary, princess and abbess, was,
however, false to her vows. How long she was abbess we do not know,
perhaps only a few months or even days. At any rate, in the very year
she became abbess, the year of her mother's death,[Footnote: See supra
under Faversham.
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