g.

But I shall have more to say to you presently about these various
additions. Let us cross over now to St. Margaret's Churchyard, and as we
stroll round the Abbey, I will tell you how it came to be built at all.
To get at the very beginning, we shall have to go back to a time long
before Edward the Confessor sat watching his workmen--to the days when
London was a Roman city, and when the site of modern Westminster was a
marshy tract of ground, crossed by various streams and channels. At that
time the river Thames and one of these channels enclosed an island about
a quarter of a mile long and somewhat less in breadth. It was a marshy
wilderness, and had the character of being "a terrible place," and
amongst its swamps and thickets the huge red deer, with his immense
antlers, and the wild ox found a refuge. When it received a name, it
became known as Thorn-Ey, that is, Isle of Thorns; in later days people
called it Thorney Island. Tradition says that in the midst of the
wilderness there was erected, in the year 154 A.D., a Temple of Apollo.
We are next told that King Lucius, who was said to have been the founder
of a great many English churches, turned the temple into a Christian
sanctuary. Then we hear that in 616 A.D., Sebert, King of Essex, founded
an Abbey here, and dedicated it to St. Peter, "in order to balance the
compliment he had made to St. Paul on Ludgate Hill." All this is very
doubtful, but from the earliest times in history there has been shown a
grave of Sebert as that of the founder of the Abbey.

Twelve monks of the Benedictine order were placed here by Dunstan, and
suffered a great deal from the Danes, who in these times did much
mischief in England. The last of the Saxon kings who kept up the long
struggle with these pagans was Edward, who by his exile to escape from
their tyranny won the title of Confessor. He was a very strange man, who
seemed never thoroughly happy except when he was sitting in church or
when he was hunting in the woods. He had milk-white hair and beard, rosy
cheeks, "thin white hands, and long transparent fingers." He was
sometimes gentle, sometimes furious; sometimes very grave, going about
with eyes fixed on the ground, sometimes bursting out into wild fits of
laughter.

Edward returned from his exile accompanied by Norman courtiers and
Norman priests, and full of Norman ideas. He appears to have been very
much delighted with his visits to the great continental cathedrals, so