By the Rev. J. E. Jackson. 



23 



thin in person, his hair flaxen, and beautifully wreathed with 

 threads of gold. 



About 20 years after Athelstan there succeeded to the Throne 

 another Pharaoh that knew not Joseph, King Edwy, whom the 

 monks describe as a weak and foolish young man. No wonder, for 

 he hated monasteries. The faces of the monks were sad and 

 pitiable : they were turned out, and their rivals, the secular clergy, 

 admitted to occupy their place. This change is described by one 

 of the ejected, in language which may be grating to the ear, 

 for he says that the monks were sent away, and the monastery 

 was turned into "a sty of secular Canons." If any secular 

 clergyman present should also happen to be a Canon, he must 

 feel that this description of his predecessors is not conveyed 

 under the most complimentary image in the world, but making 

 allowance for the provocation which the poor expelled " regular " 

 had received, we will overlook it. 



Nevertheless, the monks were a match for King Edwy. A happy 

 thought struck them. They took out of its coflin the body of his 

 great relative St. Aldhelm who had been dead more than 250 years, 

 and exhibited it in a shrine. The effect was wonderful ! The King 

 not only relented, but immediately restored the monks; and to 

 make up for his former misbehaviour, he actually bestowed upon 

 them by far the largest gift they had ever yet received, the Manor 

 of Brokenborough ; a name which must have included in those days 

 a great deal more than it does now, for it appears to have comprised 

 several of our modern parishes all round Malmesbury. 1 



The tide now settled fairly in favour of the monasteries, and in 

 the following reign (that of Edgar, from A.D. 959 to A.D. 975) these 

 establishments increased all over England both in number and in 

 wealth. The secular clergy had been illiterate and it was now their 



1 The bounds of this Grant are given with great minuteness (see Archseologia, 

 vol. xxxvii., p. 266,) but so many of the names are extinct that it is difficult to 

 follow them. In order to give those who are acquainted with the neighbourhood 

 some notion of the general extent, it may suffice to say that the Manor commencing 

 from the river Avon near Rodbourne, and including Starkeley, ranged by Bin- 

 combe in the direction of the Foss : then northward of Malmesbury, nearly as 

 far as Kemble : then S.E. by Chelworth, Eastcourt and Woburn to the skirts of 

 Braden Forest, and so baok to the Avon near Dauntesey. 



