phen, Mary, whose uncle, Henry of
Blois, was Bishop of Winchester, became abbess, and it was decided to
rebuild the place. Thus the great Norman church we have, arose in the
new England of the twelfth century. Mary, princess and abbess, was,
however, false to her vows. How long she was abbess we do not know,
perhaps only a few months or even days. At any rate, in the very year
she became abbess, the year of her mother's death,[Footnote: See supra
under Faversham.] she forsook her trust and married the son of the Earl
of Flanders, and by him she had two daughters. Then came repentance;
she separated from her husband and returned to Romsey as a penitent.

The great religious house which had grown up thus with England,
continued its great career right through the Middle Ages, about forty
nuns serving there in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, though
this number had dwindled to twenty-three at the time of the Surrender
in 1539. How this surrender was made we do not know; but whether with
or without trouble the result was the same, the great convent was
utterly destroyed. Many of the lands passed to Sir Thomas Seymour, and
the people of Romsey, who had always had a right to the north aisle of
the church, which indeed they enlarged at their own expense in 1403,
bought the whole from the Crown, for one hundred pounds, in 1554.

I have said that there was undoubtedly a great Saxon church here, where
the Norman Abbey of Romsey now stands, and part of the foundations of
this great building were discovered in 1900. That building, founded by
Edward the Elder, rebuilt by Edgar and restored by Canute, stood till
the building of the present church in 1125. The older part of this
building (1125-1150) is to the east of the nave, and consists of
sanctuary and transepts: the nave was begun towards the end of the
twelfth century, the church being finished in the beginning of the
thirteenth. The church is cruciform, two hundred and sixty-three feet
long and one hundred and thirty-one wide; it consists of a great
sanctuary with aisles ending in chapels, square without, apsidal
within, wide transepts each having an eastern apsidal chapel, nave with
aisles, and over the crossing a low tower which was once higher, having
now a seventeenth century polygonal belfry. To the east of the
sanctuary stood two long chapels destroyed since the Suppression. We
have here, as I have said, one of the most glorious Norman buildings in
the world, Norm