138 The Abbey-church. 



■other edifices of its kind in England does it exemplify that 

 variety of styles which, in many of its compeers, adds a zest 

 to the studies of the ecclesiologist. 



Local church-history up to the year 1087 being involved 

 in much obscurity, later writers differ as to the reading of the 

 scanty and sometimes conflicting records of those early ages 

 which have been handed down to us. It is, however, not 

 disputed that, in 676 A.D., Osric here built a nunnery, the 

 site of which is unknown : but many precedents make it 

 probable that it stood in that part of the town which was 

 devoted to similar uses for several succeeding centuries ; 

 and that the present Abbey-church of Bath is its lineal 

 successor. Osric's house soon disappears from our view ; 

 and its place seems to have been taken by another establish- 

 ment, of which we have various notices not easily reconciled. 

 According to a recent inscription on a brass tablet in the 

 Abbey, " the first cathedral* was built on this site by King 

 Offa " in the year 773. Warner quotes a record that in 775 

 Offa, king of Mercia, founded a college of secular canons 

 upon the ruins of Osric's nunnery : while Prof. Earle, in his 

 "Bath Ancient and Modern," discrediting the founder's 

 •claims of that king, says that in 781 "the monastery" of 

 Bath, (w^ich must have been long established, for it is de- 

 scribed as " monasterium illud celeberrimum"), being at the 

 time a dependency of that at Worcester, was surrendered to 

 Offa, who desired to appropriate the patronage to himself. 



Nothing more is known of it for 150 years; although 

 Warner (on no good authority) says that, in the middle of 

 the ninth century, Bath was devastated by the Danes ; and 

 he concludes that the religious house suffered the same fate 

 as the town. Whatever the facts may have been, a partial 

 * The use of the word ' ' cathedral " here is incorrect. 



