By the Rev. J. E. Jackson. 



27 



for the ocular gratification of the rustics by a hideous portrait over 

 a public-house. 



Edward the Confessor became King in 1042. His family chap- 

 lain, one Herman, of a Flemish family was made Bishop of 

 Wiltshire. A vacancy occurring in the Abbey of Malmesbury, 

 Bishop Herman (following the precedent of Ealstan, Bishop of 

 Sherborne 1 ) proposed to unite the Abbey of Malmesbury with the 

 Bishoprick. The King consented, but the Monks defeated the 

 scheme. One ancient chronicle says that this Bishop Herman 

 built a Bell Tower to the Abbey Church, about the year 1060. 



In the " Archseologia," vol. xxxvii, p. 257, there is a very valu- 

 able Article by Mr. J. Y. Akerman, on the "Possessions of the 

 Abbey of Malmesbury, in North Wilts," down to the end of the 

 Anglo-Saxon dynasty. Many of the charters are given, and the 

 land limits mentioned in them are in many cases identified. 



William the Conqueror greatly patronised the Monastery. He 

 deposited there many valuable relics brought from Rouen, and also 

 imported three Norman Abbots one after another to rule over it. 3 

 The Queen Matilda bestowed lands at Garsdon, in return for which 

 gracious act the Monk who tells this history, politely calls her 

 " the mirror of prudence and the pink of modesty." The king also 

 instituted a yearly feast in honour of St. Aldhelm, to last five days, 

 which the Queen increased to eight. This used to draw such 



1 See Cassan's " Lives of the Bishops of Sherborne and Salisbury," p. 40. 



2 The Rev. Dr. J. Milnerinhis " Treatise on the Ecclesiastical Architecture of 

 England," p. 44 (note), says ; "It appears from Wm, of Malmsbury, that some 

 great and expensive works were carried on at the church of his monastery by 

 its Norman Abbots, particularly by Warinus de Lyra. De Pontif. L. v." 

 And again at p. 79 (note) ; " There is good reason to judge from "William of 

 Malmsbury's account of his own monastery in particular, that the intersecting 

 arches still seen there were made by Abbot Warin de Lira, a Norman, in 1080." 

 The only passage in Wm. of Malmesbury' s works that the present writer has 

 hitherto been able to find, relating to any building by Abbot Warin de Lira, 

 amounts to this. That the Norman Abbot took offence at the bones of some of 

 his predecessors being kept in two stone vases on each side of the Altar of St. 

 Mary's, and turning them out as so much common rubbish, buried them in the 

 farthest corner of the chapel of St. Michael, ivhich chapel he widened and raised. 

 No allusion has been met with, to any "great and expensive works" carried 

 on by Abbot Warin in the principal church. 



