By the Bev. Canon W. E. Jones, F.S.A. 



307 



regards the large accession of territory in these parts of England 

 gained by the conquerors, and indirectly to the re-establishment of 

 Christianity here. For Cenwalch, who had abjured Christianity and 

 at the same time repudiated his wife, and had been in the year 642 

 driven temporarily from his kingdom, no sooner regained it by the 

 battles at Bradford and at the Pens, than he returned from his 

 apostacy, and became not long afterwards the founder of a Church at 

 Winchester. And it is of no little interest to us to know, that 

 Aldhelm, whose name should be so well known and reverenced here 

 as the founder of our Saxon Church, that cradle of primitive Christi- 

 anity, was nephew of King Cenwalch. 



II.— As to its ecclesiastical character ; — this seems impressed upon 

 us by the quaint and church -like look of so many of its buildings. 

 Each of the old limits of the town was at one time guarded as 

 though by an ancient chapel— those of St. Laurence, St. Olave, St. 

 Mary at Tory, St. Margaret, by the bridge, St. Catharine, near the 

 old almshouses— five ecclesiastical barbicans, two of them still re- 

 maining to us in good preservation, and the sites of all the rest being 

 well known. Nor is this ecclesiastical character surprising when 

 we recollect its history. Here, as early as A.D. 705 S. Aldhelm 

 founded his little Church, and what is called his " monastery," by 

 which is meant a Church and dwelling-house with three or four 

 missionaries, as we might say, attached to it. No doubt for 

 many years after this, Bradford-on-Avon, though otherwise as 

 regards its "monastery" and Church an independent foundation, 

 and certainly not supported by any means derived from Malmesbury , 

 owed allegiance to that religious house and to its Abbots from time 

 to time. But in the year A.D. lOOi we find the whole manor of 

 Bradford, together with its monastery — then called coenobium — bes- 

 towed by King iEthelred on the Abbess of Shaftesbury, the specific 

 object of this gift being to " provide the nuns of Shaftesbury a safe 

 refuo-e (the exact words are impenetrabile confiigium) from the attacks 

 of the Danes, and a hiding-place for the relics of the blessed King 

 Edward, then recently martyred, and the rest of the saints. And 

 for more i\\a.nfive hundred years, the manor of Bradford was in the 

 hands of the Abbesses of Shaftesbury for the time being. This may 



