60 Malmesbury Abbey in its Best Days. 



Nothing (so to speak) of this kind was done : so that we are 

 justified in saying that a splendid opportunity — in every sense a 

 golden one, was simply thrown away. I might pei'haps say, shame- 

 fully thrown away : remembering the avarice and the jobbery with 

 which the plunder was distributed. ' 



So ended the great, the powerful Monastic system in England : 

 and in its best days, in many ways so useful. So ended Malmesbury 

 Abbey : so vanished the Benedictines. 



They have however not vanished altogether. 



The Orders and the Dignities still survive. We have amongst us 

 still, Benedictines, Carmelites, Dominicans and the like. We have 

 still Abbots and Priors. They are peaceable, learned and diligent 

 Ecclesiastics, not Territorial Princes like their predecessors, and not 

 in any way likely to menace the Civil power of the Realm. Whether 

 there is now an Abbot of Malmesbury or not, I do not happen to 

 know : but if there is and he should come here, he certainly would 

 not find himself as in days of yore, monarch of all he surveyed. He 

 might look for his vineyard, but he would find a Railway Station, 

 and if he looked for pilgrims at the Shrine of St. Aldhelm, travel- 

 worn and foot-sore with, or without, peas in their shoes, I don't 

 know where or when he would be more likely to find them, than in 

 this Town Hall tomorrow evening, after your next " Excursion/' 



J. E. J. 



* As an instance. Thomas Cromwell, son of a Putney blacksmith, was sur- 

 named from the part he took in demolishing monasteries " Malleus monachorum," 

 the Sledge-liammer of the monks. The Sledge-hammer's nephew, Sir Robert 

 William, assumed the name of Cromwell, and being in favour with King Henry 

 VIII, obtained at the Dissolution nearly the whole of the lands in Huntingdon- 

 shire that had belonged to any Religious House in that county : viz., St. Neot's, 

 Ramsey, Huntingdon, Hinchingbroke and Salti'ey or Saltre. See Tanner's 

 Notitia Monastica. 



