78 PAPJBRS, ETC. 



sacred Community was loeated, which brought refinement 

 and civilization to a spot remote from the eye of the great 

 world, and little better than a wilderness. A dismal 

 extent of morass lay around, almost as widely as ken could 

 reach, hardly safe for the foot even in the summer of occa- 

 sional years, and during the winter altogether impassable. 

 The place, indeed, as William of Malmesbury asserts, was 

 selected for these very characteristics.* Highway to it 

 there was none. Visitors, in the ordinavy sense of the 

 term, were few and far between. Their isolation, hovvever, 

 from all the world was welcomed by the brotherhood as a 

 boon, and assisted, no doubt, to invest themselves and their 

 abode with a halo of additional sanctity. 



Alfred, Ina, and Athelstan, are each named as the 

 fuunder of the House, which was one of the many estab- 

 lishments owing obedience to the Benedictine rule. The 

 claims of the two monarchs first mentioned are more than 

 doubtful, and the most trustworthy of the ancient chroni- 

 clers unite in attributing the honour to the last-named 

 povereign. It was, according to Matthew of Westminster, 

 in the year 939 that the Abbey of Muchelney, or, as it is 

 variously written, Michelney, Mochelney, Muchenay, etc., 

 was founded by the amiable and pious Athelstan, the first 

 monarch of all England. The grandson and favourite of 

 the great Alfred, he had encountered, five years before the 

 date just mentioned, an enormous host of Anglo-Danes, 

 Irish, Northmen, Scotch levies, and Welsh bands, collected 

 under the command of their native princes. A portion of 

 these were sufficiently numerous to fill above six hundred 



* " Contulit author et villarum et reliquiarum xenia, eoque plus quod 

 monachi liberius ccelestibus possiut exuberare secretis quo minus frequen- 

 tantur hominum conventiculis. Est enim aditu difEcilis, permeaturque 

 ssstate pede vel equo plerumque, hierue nusquam." W. Malmesb. fol. 

 1 15, b. 





