ions
since Christianity had come to her, and then, in two generations of
men, ceased suddenly to be. There is, perhaps, not one in a thousand
of the vague Colonials who regard Westminster Abbey as a sort of
inevitable centre for Britishers and Anglo-Saxons, who has so much as
heard of Chertsey. There is perhaps but one in a hundred of historical
students who could attach a definite connection to the name, and yet
Chertsey came next in the list of the great Benedictine Abbeys;
Chertsey also was coeval with England.

Chertsey went the way of them all. The last abbot, John Cordery,
surrendered it in the July of 1537, but he and his community were not
immediately dispersed, they were taken off to fill that strange new
foundation of Bisham, of which we shall hear later in connection with
the river, and which in its turn immediately disappeared. Not a year
had passed, the June of 1538 was not over, when the new community at
Bisham was scattered as the old one at Chertsey had been.

Of the abbey itself nothing is left but a broken piece of gateway, and
the few stones of a wall. But a relic of it remains in Black Cherry
Fair, a market granted to the abbey in the fifteenth century and
formerly held upon St. Anne's Hill and upon St. Anne's Day.

The fate of this monastery has something about it particularly tragic,
for the abbot and the monks of Chertsey when they surrendered did so
in the full expectation of continuing their monastic life at Bisham,
and if Bisham was treacherously destroyed immediately after the fault
does not lie at their door.

With Abingdon it was otherwise. The last prior was perhaps the least
steadfast of all the many bewildered or avaricious characters that
meet us in the story of the Dissolution. He was one Thomas Rowland,
who had watched every movement of Henry's mind, and had, if possible,
gone before. He did not even wait until the demand was made to him,
but suggested the abandonment of the trust which so many generations
of Englishmen had left in his hands, and he had a reward in the gift
not only of a very large pension but also of the Manor of Cumnor,
which had been before the destruction of the religious orders the
sanatorium or country house of the monks. He obtained it: and from his
time on Cumnor has borne an air of desolation and of murder, nor does
any part of his own palace remain.

When any organised economic system disappears, there is nothing more
interesting in history than to watc