The Inaugural Address. 11 



In 652j a battle at Bradford, on the Avon, made the forest tract his 

 own, while a fresh fight with the Welsh, six years later, in 658, at 

 a place called Pens, cleared them from the ground along the upper 

 Parrett. It must have been soon after this conquest, that Maidulf, 

 an Irish scholar monk, set up his heritage in the forest tract which 

 had been torn from the Britons, and drew around him the first 

 scholars of Wessex. Ealdhelm, as we have seen, was the most 

 famous outcome of this school ; but he no sooner succeeded Maidulf 

 as abbot of the little township which was growing up round that 

 teacher's school and church — and which still preserves his memory 

 in its name of ' Maidulf burh,' or Malmesbury, — than he became a 

 centre, not only of intellectual, but of religious and industrial 

 activity in its neighbourhood. In the heart of the great woodland 

 which stretched from Malmesbury to the Channel, he planted four 

 new germs of social life in the monasteries which he established at 

 Bradford, on the Avon ; at Frome, on the little river which bears 

 that name ; at Sherborne, on the borders of the forest country 

 through which the Dorssetas must have been still at this time push- 

 ing their way ; and at Wareham, on the coast beside Poole — a point 

 which shows that these invaders had already advanced at least thus 

 far towards the west. The churches he raised at these spots are 

 noteworthy as the first instances of building which we meet with iu 

 Wessex, but they had nothing of the rudeness of early works ; 

 architecturally, indeed, they were superior to the famous churches 

 which Benedict Biseope was raising at this time by the banks of the 

 Wear. So masterly was their construction, that Ealdhelm's churches 

 at Malmesbury and Sherborne were the only churches of this early 

 time that were spared by the Norman architects after the Conquest ; 

 while the church which he erected on the scene of Cenwealth's 

 victory at Bradford-on-Avon stands in almost perfect preservation 

 to-day." ^ It may be presumed, from the name of Wilset having 



* " Making of England," page 340. The author of this work has quite recently 

 been lost to literature by death. I am glad to have this opportunity, in the 

 pages of a magazine devoted to the subjects in the knowledge of which he was 

 pre-eminent, of expressing my sense of the loss which archeology has thereby 



