dda was in 1051 made Earl over Devonshire,
Somerset, Dorset, and the Welsh. The same chronicle says that Odda was
also called Agelwin. Florence of Worcester says that he was also
called Ethelwin.

It is perhaps easy to see how a chronicler writing 250 years later,
should be led to assume that Oddo and Doddo were identical with Odda
and Dodda. Sir Charles Isham's "Registrum Theokusburiae" gives a
full-page illustration of this "_par nobile fratrum_," as Dr. Hayman
calls them, in which they are termed "_duo duces Marciorum et primi
fundatores Theokusburiae_" i.e., two Earls of the Marches and first
founders of Tewkesbury. Each knight is in armour, and bears in his
hand a model of a church. Both are supporting a shield (affixed to a
pomegranate tree) bearing the arms of the Abbey, which the blazoning
on their own coats repeats.

[Illustration: PAGE FROM THE "REGISTRUM THEOKUSBURIAE."
(_H.J.L.J.M._)]

According to the chronicle, Hugh, a great Earl of the Mercians, caused
the body of Berthric or Brictric, King of Wessex, to be buried in the
chapel of St. Faith in the church at Tewkesbury, in 799 or 800, and
Hugh himself was buried at Tewkesbury in 812. Of this fact
confirmation is given by Leland, who said that Hugh's tomb was there
in his time, on the north side of the nave.

The Priory suffered terribly at the hands of the invading Danes--in
fact, it was in the centre of the theatre of war in which, under
Alfred, the decisive struggle was fought to an end at Boddington
Field, where a spot called the Barrow still marks the site. In
consequence of the continued ravages the Priory was so reduced in 980
that it became a cell dependent on the Abbey at Cranbourn, in Dorset,
a Benedictine foundation of which Haylward de Meaux, Hayward Snow, or
Hayward de Meawe as the Isham MS. Chronicle spells it, was the founder
and patron. He and his wife Algiva are depicted in that MS. as sitting
on a mound with a cruciform building in their hands. The church has a
lofty embattled tower surmounted with a spire. Hayward fell at
Essendune in 1016, and was buried at Cranbourn. Tewkesbury Priory
continued to be dependent on Cranbourn for about one hundred years.

Hayward's son, Earl Algar, inherited the patronage of Cranbourn and
Tewkesbury, and on his death it passed to his son Berthric, or,
according to the Isham MS., Britricus Meawe. This Britric, while on an
embassy in Flanders, refused the hand of the Earl's daughter Matilda,
who