35 
He said that Sherborne owes its existence to the fact that 
it was chosen in 765 to be the site of the Cathedral Church of St. 
Ealdheim, the first Bishop of Western or Newer Wessex. Like 
Wells and Salisbury, it is a Bishop’s town, but differs from them 
in this, that from 998 to 1539 it was also a seat of a Benedictine 
Monastery. It suffered two shocks, the first when it lost its 
Bishop in 1075, the second when its Abbey was dissolved in 1539. 
Sherborne was never a walled town; it lay under the protection 
of the fortified palace of its Bishop and its position, remote from 
the sea and the waterways rendered it safe from the Danish in¬ 
roads. This and the fact of its being the second city of Wessex 
accounts for its being selected by King HSthalbald for his capital 
when Winchester in 860 was laid waste by the Danes and it con¬ 
tinued to be the capital of Wessex till about 878. 
It is very probable that King Alfred spent his boyhood and 
received here what education he had, during the reign of his 
brother, King AEthelbert. 
Alfred’s two brothers, HSthelbald and EEthelbert, who 
successively reigned before Hvthelred and himself, were buried in 
the Abbey Church, as also were Bishop Ealdhlem, St. Osmund, 
Bishop of Salisbury, and Stephen Harding, author of the 
Carta Caritatis ” and the real founder of the Cistercian Order. 
Roger Niger, of Caen, Abbot of Sherborne and Bishop of 
Salisbury, built the Norman Castle and the Norman part of the 
Abbey Church. It was he who organised the English Court of 
Exchequer for Henry I., and it was in consequence of his rebellion 
against King Stephen that the Bishops of Sarum were deprived 
of Sherborne Castle for over two centuries. 
With the exception of a small part of the west front of the 
Abbey Church, there is not, as far as is known, a single piece 
of wall now standing in Sherborne which was standing in the 
year 1107 when Roger became Bishop of Salisbury and Abbot of 
Sherborne. The doorway, now blocked up, on the north side 
of the west front of the Church, is Saxon work, probably 
Ealdheim’s, and is all that is left. The Norman Church, which 
Roger built, extended as far east as the present Church does,' ex¬ 
cluding the Lady Chapel, and rather farther west than at present, 
for before the Parish Church of All Saints’ was built on to 
the west side of the Monastic Church towards the end of the 14th 
century, the west front of the Church was embellished with a 
large porch of Norman work. 
In the 13th century a Lady Chapel of three bays was added, 
only one of which remains, now included in the Old Master’s House. 
In the 14th century important changes were made on the outside. 
The Norman west porch was pulled down, so that the new Parish 
Church of All Saints’ might stand directly against the west front 
of the Abbey Church. Where All Hallows was standing, with 
its pinnacled western tower, one would see a church some 350ft. 
long, with a central and western tower, so that it would look 
