ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



Wulfsin or Wulfsy, 992—1001, was responsible for the reorganization of Sher- 

 borne, monks being substituted for the secular canons who had occupied the 

 house since its foundation in 705;*^ iEthelric, looi ; *" yEthelsige or ^Ethelsie,*^ 

 1012— 14 ; Brihtwy or Brihtwin, included in the list of bishops given by 

 William of Malmesbury and Florence of Worcester, but whose name does 

 not appear in any charters of that period ; i^lfmaer, 1017, whose succession 

 is recorded under the year 1022 in the Decern Scriptores*^ ; Brihtwy, 1023, 

 subscribed in 1044 as bishop of Sherborne to a charter of Edward the Con- 

 fessor;*' iElfwold, 1045, to whom the Confessor addressed a charter testi- 

 fying a grant to Ore or Orcus his minister, the founder of Abbotsbury, 

 of the shore of all his lands/" In 1058 by the appointment of Herman 'the 

 king's priest,' who already held the bishopric of Ramsbury, the two sees of 

 Sherborne and Ramsbury which had been separated on the division of the 

 diocese in 909, became again united under one bishop holding jurisdiction 

 over the counties of Berkshire, Wiltshire and Dorset." The bishop's stool re- 

 mained at Sherborne till the year 1075, when, by decree of the council of 

 London ordering the removal of sees from small towns and villages to more 

 populous centres, it was transferred to the city of Old Sarum,^^ and the head 

 of the diocese, which had hitherto pertained to Dorset, passed finally away 

 from the county. 



Glancing back over the three and a half centuries that elapsed 

 between the foundation of the see at Sherborne and its transference to Old 

 Sarum, the characteristic feature of this period as regards this county will be 

 found in the rise and growth of those religious houses on whose pivot the 

 whole ecclesiastical structure seemed to turn. To it belonged those great 

 Benedictine houses that were at once the glory and the distinctive feature of 

 Dorset. Sherborne, coeval with the bishopric itself ; Shaftesbury, linked in 

 memory with the greatest of Saxon kings, the long line of whose abbesses 

 commences in Alfred's daughter ; ^^ Milton, built by King iEthelstan about 

 the year 953 to commemorate for the soul of the young Prince Edwin, or, 

 as some monkish chroniclers insist, to expiate the crime of a brother's 

 murder ; " Cerne and Abbotsbury, whose traditionary history goes back 

 to the very dawn of Christianity in this island, and the early mission of 

 St. Augustine"; the later dependent cells of Cranborne and Horton, 

 which before the Conquest enjoyed the status of abbeys. The action of the 

 claimant vEthelwold in seizing Wimborne on the accession of his cousin 

 Edward the Elder to the throne in 901, and the declaration that here 'he 

 would either live or lie,'^' illustrates the early importance that the town 

 and church enjoyed as th^ residence and sepulchre of Wessex kings. Few 

 counties of the size of Dorset can show such a list of wealthy and influential 

 houses as are to be found here at the time of the Domesday Survey. 



" Leknd, Collect, iii, 150 ; Ititi. ii, 51-2. " Kemble, Codex Dlpl. iii, 708. 



*' Ibid, vi, 1302. 



*' W. Thome, De rebus Abbat. Cant. (Twysden), 1782. 



" Codex Dlpl. iv, 771, 774-5. His death is recorded in the Angl.-^ax. Chron. (Rolls Ser. 134) under 

 the year 1043. 



" Codex Dlpl. iv, 871. 



" Wm. of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontif. (Rolls Ser.), 183. " Ibid. 66-8. 



■"' See Alfred's Charter of endowment. Birch, Cart. Sax. ii, 148. 



" Dugdale, Mon. ii, 348, Cbart. under Milton, No. iii. 



" Coker, Particular Surv. of Dorset, 30, 66. " Angl.-Sax. Chron. (Rolls Ser.), 75. 



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