[Illustration: OFFA BEING INVESTED WITH SPURS
There is another argument—or an illustration—in favour of the antiquity of some church, rude or not, upon this place. I advance it as an illustration, though to myself it appears to be an argument. I mean the long list of relics possessed by the Abbey at the Dedication of the year 1065. We are not concerned with the question whether the relics were genuine or not, but merely with the fact that they were preserved by the monks as having been the gifts of various benefactors—Sebert, Offa, Athelstan, Edgar, Ethelred, Cnut, Queen Emma, and Edward himself. A church of small importance and of recent building would not dare to parade such pretensions. It takes time even for pretences to gain credence and for legends to grow. The relics ascribed to Sebert and Offa could easily have been carried away on occasion of attack. As for the nature of these sacred fragments, it is pleasant to read of sand and earth brought from Mount Sinai and Olivet; of the beam which supported the holy manger; of a piece of the holy manger; of frankincense presented by the Magi; of the seat on which our Lord was presented at the Temple; of portions of the holy cross presented by four kings at different times; of bones and vestments belonging to Apostles and Martyrs and the Virgin Mary, and saints without number, whose very names are now forgotten. In the cathedral of Aix-la-Chapelle you may see just such a collection as that which the monks of St. Peter displayed before the reverent and uncritical eyes of the Confessor. We may remember that in the ninth and tenth centuries the rage for pilgrimising extended over the whole of Western Europe; pilgrims crowded every road, they marched in armies, and they returned laden with treasures—water from the Jordan, sand from Sinai, clods of earth from Gethsemane, and bones and bits of sacred wood without number. When Peter the Hermit arose to preach, it was but putting a match to a pile ready to be fired. But for such a list as that preserved by history, there was need of time as well as of credulity.
Roman Britain, we have said, was Christian for at least a hundred and fifty years. Therefore it would be nothing out of the way or unusual to find monastic buildings on Thorney in the fourth century. There was as yet no Benedictine Rule. St. Martin of Tours introduced the Egyptian Rule into Gaul—whence it was taken over to England and to Ireland. It was a simple Rule, resembling that of the Essenes. No one had any property; all things were in common; the only art allowed to be practised was that of writing. The older monks devoted their whole time to prayer; they took their meals together—bread and herbs with salt—and, except for common prayer and common meals, they rarely left their cells; these were at first simple huts constructed of clay and bunches of reeds; their churches were of wood; they shaved their heads to the line of the ears; they wore leather jerkins, probably because these lasted longer than cloth of any kind; many of them wore hair shirts. The wooden church became a stone church; the huts became cells built about a cloister; next, the cells themselves were abolished, and a common dormitory was substituted.