L80,000 a year. It produced more of the effect which we might
to-day imagine would be produced by a million. The fortune of but very
few families could so much as compare with it, and the fortunes of
individual families, especially of wealthy families, were, during the
existence of a strong king, highly perilous, and often cut short;
nothing could pretend to equal such an economic power but the Crown,
which then was, and which remained until the victory of the
aristocracy in the Civil Wars, by far the richest legal personality in
Britain. The temptation to sack Westminster was something like the
temptation presented to our financial powers to-day to get at the
rubber of the Congo Basin or at the unexploited coal of Northern
China.

By a miracle that temptation was withstood. For the moment Henry
intended to construct a bishopric with its cathedral out of the old
corporation and abbey. He might have done so and yet have yielded
immediately after to his cupidity, as he did with the Cathedral of
Osney. It ended in the form which it at present maintains. The greater
part of its revenues were, of course, stolen, but the fabric was
spared and enough income was retained to permit the continuous life of
Westminster to our own time.

Men are slow to conceive what might have been--nay, what almost
_was_--in their national history; it seems difficult to our generation
to imagine Westminster Abbey absent only from the national life; yet
Abingdon is gone, all but a gateway, Reading all but a few ruined
walls, Chertsey has utterly disappeared, so has Osney, so has
Sheen--to mention the great river houses alone: Westminster alone
survives, and the only reason it survives is that it had about it at
the time of the destruction of the monasteries a royal flavour, and
that its existence helped to bolster up the Tudors. But for that it
would have been sold like the rest, the lead would have been stripped
from its roof, the glass broken and thrown aside, and a Cecil or a
Howard would have built himself a palace with the stones. It is but a
chance that the words "Westminster Abbey" mean more to us to-day than
"Woburn Abbey," "Bewley Abbey" or any one of the scores of "Abbeys,"
"Priories," and the rest, which are the names of our country houses.

Chertsey and Abingdon were less fortunate than Westminster.

Chertsey, indeed, has so thoroughly disappeared that it might be taken
as a symbol of all that England had been for the thirty generat