end it was a
charcoal burner of Minstead, Purkess by name, who found the King's body
and bore it away, and ever after his descendants have remained in
Minstead, neither richer nor poorer than their ancestor. As for Sir
Walter, he is said to have sworn to the Prior of St Denys de Poix, a
monastery of his foundation, that he knew nothing of the King's death.
Leland tells us that in his day not only did the tree still exist
against which, according to him, the arrow glanced off and struck the
King, but a little chapel remained there then very old, in which Mass
was wont to be offered for the repose of the King's soul. I wish that I
might have seen it, for it would have pleased me.

Now when I had well considered all this, not without an orison for that
misguided King, I set off for Cadnam, and holding now only to the road,
marching fast, for it was late, I came over the ridge beyond Black
water into the valley of the Test, and so entered Romsey a little after
it was dark.

[Illustration: ROMSEY ABBEY]

Romsey, as I soon found on the following morning, has nothing at all to
offer the traveller except one of the most solemn and noble Norman
churches in all England, monastic too, for it was the church of the
great Benedictine Nunnery of Our Lady of Romsey. It is impossible to
exaggerate the impression this astonishing Norman pile, of vast size
and unsurpassed age and reverence, makes upon the traveller. One seems
in looking upon it to see before his eyes the foundation of England. I
cannot hope to describe it or to convey to another what it meant to me.
It is at once grandiose and reverent, of enormous, almost incredible
size and weight and strength larger than many a cathedral, heavy as a
kingdom, stronger than a thousand years. It seems to have been hewn
bodily out of the cliffs or the great hills.

It is enormously old. The house was founded or perhaps refounded more
than a millennium ago by Edward the Elder in 907; his daughter was
abbess here, and here was buried. In 967 Edgar his grandson gave the
house to the Benedictines. It remained English after the Conquest, for
William seems not to have dealt with it and in 1086 the sister of Edgar
Atheling became abbess. Out of it Henry I. chose his bride that
Abbess's niece Maud a novice of Our Lady of Romsey. Said I not well
that it was as the foundation of England?

We know little of the Abbey for near a hundred years after that, and
then in 1160 the daughter of King Ste