The life of Eadward was now drawing near to its end; we are approaching the close of the first act of our great drama. From the illness into which Eadward was thrown by the excitement of the Northumbrian revolt, he never thoroughly recovered.^[1488] He barely lived to complete the |His foundation at Westminster.| great work of his life. The royal saint deemed himself set upon the throne, not to secure the welfare or the independence of his Kingdom, but to build a church and endow a monastery in honour of the Prince of the Apostles. If we were reading the life, not of a King, but of a Bishop or Abbot, we might well look on this as an object worthy of the devotion of a life. It was no small work to rear that stately minster which has ever since been the crowning-place of our Kings, and which for so many ages remained their place of burial. It was no small work to call into being that mighty Abbey, whose chapter-house plays so great a part in the growth of the restored freedom of England, and which has well nigh supplanted the Kentish mother-church itself as the ecclesiastical home of the English nation. The church of Saint Peter at Westminster, the great work of Eadward’s life, has proved a more than equal rival of the older sanctuaries of Canterbury and York and Winchester and Glastonbury. But, as the work of a King in such an age, we look on it with very different feelings from those with which we look on the ecclesiastical works of Ælfred or Æthelstan or Harold. In the eyes of those great rulers, a care for ecclesiastical administration and ecclesiastical reform, the establishment of foundations likely to spread piety and enlightenment among their people, naturally and rightly seemed an important part of the duty of a Prince. But in Eadward we can discern no sign of the higher aspirations of a ruler; a monk rather than a King, he seems never to have risen beyond a monk’s selfish anxiety for the welfare of his own |Eadward’s devotion for Saint Peter.| soul. The special object of Eadward’s reverence was the Apostle Peter,^[1489] and his reverence for that Saint did no good to the Kingdom of England. His devotion to the Apostle led to a devotion to his supposed successor, and to that increased frequency of intercourse with the Roman See which is a marked characteristic of his reign. There seems no reason to doubt, though his Biographer is silent on the subject,^[1490] that, as I have told the tale in earlier chapters, Eadward vowed a pilgrimage to Rome, that his Witan dissuaded him from leaving his Kingdom, that Pope Leo dispensed with his vow, and imposed on him, instead of a personal visit to the tomb of the Apostle, the duty of founding or enlarging a monastery in his honour within his own Kingdom. We have seen that the two missions of Ealdred and other Prelates to Rome were probably connected with this design. The earlier one was sent to obtain the remission of the vow, the later one to obtain the |His foundation in honour of the Apostle. 1051–1065.| Papal confirmation of the privileges of the house.^[1491] We thus get a clear notion of the chronology of the foundation which occupied Eadward during the last fourteen years of his reign. It must again be remembered that the foundation of a monastery followed a course exactly opposite to |Reverse order of proceeding at Westminster and at Waltham.| the foundation of a secular college. In a secular college the Canons or other clergy are ministers appointed, for the common advantage of the Church and realm, to maintain divine worship in a particular building. In a monastery, the monks are men who go out of the world to save their own souls, and who need a church of their own to pray in. In a college then the minster itself comes first; the clergy exist only for its sake, and for the sake of those who worship in it. In a monastery the society of monks comes first, and the minster exists only for their sake. Harold therefore, in his great work at Waltham, first built his church; he then settled the exact details of his foundation, the number, the duties, the endowments, of the clergy whom he placed in it.^[1492] Eadward no doubt began to build his church as soon as he had formed the scheme of his foundation; but the church was not the same primary object which it was at Waltham, nor did its building need to be pressed forward with the same special speed. At Waltham the charter of foundation dates two years later than the |Completion of the foundation, 1061.| consecration of the minster.^[1493] At Westminster the foundation itself, the establishment and endowment of the monastic society, no doubt the building of the refectory, |Consecration of the church, 1065.| dormitory, and other buildings needed for their personal use, had all been brought to perfection at least four years before the minster itself was ready for consecration.^[1494]

The rescript of Pope Leo required Eadward either to found a new, or to enlarge an old, monastery in honour of |The Monastery of Thorney or Westminster.| Saint Peter. He preferred the latter course. And we are told that the visions of a holy recluse named Wulfsige, probably the same who had finally determined Saint Wulfstan to accept his Bishoprick, guided him to the predestined site.^[1495] At a little distance from the western gate of London lay what was then an island of the Thames, which, from the dense bushes and thickets with which it was covered, received the name of Thorney.^[1496] There stood a |Its foundation. 653–660.| monastery whose origin was carried up to the earliest days of English Christianity. There Sigeberht, the first Christian King of the East-Saxons, had begun a foundation in honour of Saint Peter, to balance, as it were, the great minster of Saint Paul within the city.^[1497] Legends gathered round the spot; the Bishop Mellitus, when about to hallow the church, was warned not to repeat the ceremony; the church had been already hallowed by the Apostle himself in his own honour.^[1498] The church of Saint Peter, from its position with regard to the church of the brother Apostle, obtained the name, so familiar and so historical in the ears of every |Its state in Eadward’s time.| Englishman, of the West Minster. Its reputation however remained for several centuries altogether inferior to that of its eastern rival. We are told that in Eadward’s time the foundation was poor, the monks few, the buildings mean.^[1499] |Burial of Harold the son of Cnut. 1040.| Yet against this description we must set the fact that Westminster was chosen as the burial-place of at least one King, and that a King who had not died in the immediate neighbourhood.^[1500] We have also found the death of at least one Abbot of the house thought worthy of record in the national Chronicles.^[1501] The temporary burial-place of the first Harold was now chosen by Eadward as the place for his own sepulchre,^[1502] as the place for the redemption of his vow, as the place which should become the sacred hearth of the English nation, the crowning-place of its future Kings.^[1503] The site, so near to the great city, and yet removed from its immediate throng and turmoil,^[1504] was chosen as the site of a foundation in which royalty and monasticism were to dwell side by side, where living Kings were to dwell and hold their court under the shadow of the pile which covered the bones of the Kings who had gone before them. Like Fécamp, which may well have been his model,^[1505] like Holyrood and the Escorial in later times, Eadward designed to place palace and monastery in each other’s close neighbourhood, to make Westminster the centre of all the strongest national feelings of religion and loyalty. And he has had his reward. His scheme prospered in his own time, and it has survived to ours. |Permanance of Eadward’s minster and palace.| His minster still stands, rebuilt, partly by a more illustrious bearer of his own name, in such a guise as to make it the noblest of the noble churches of England. But, in its subordinate buildings, large traces still remain of the work of its sainted founder. Within, it has supplanted Sherborne and Glastonbury and Winchester as the resting-place of the Kings and worthies of our land. And as the centre of them all, displacing God’s altar from its worthiest site, still stands the shrine of Eadward himself, his name and his dust still abiding in somewhat of their ancient honour, while the nobler dust of Ælfred and Eadgar and Harold is scattered to the winds. And by the minster still stands the palace; no longer indeed the dwelling-place of Kings, but more than ever the true home of the nation; where the Witan of all England still meet for judgement and for legislation, as they did in the days when Eadward wore his Crown at that last Midwinter Feast, as they did when the first national act done beneath the roof of the newly hallowed minster, was to place that Crown, as the gift of the English people, on the brow of the foremost man of English blood and speech.

The church of Westminster, as built by Eadward, has wholly given way to the conceptions of later architects, who, in the true spirit of mediæval times, sought to do fresh honour to the saint by making his own work give way to theirs. With our feelings on such matters, we should look on the pile itself as the best monument of its founder, and, if the original West Minster had descended to our time, our first object would be to preserve its genuine features precisely as they came from the hands of its first builders. In the ideas of the thirteenth century the memories of the past, the associations of a spot or of a building, were feebly felt compared with the devotion which was felt towards the precious possession of all, the saint himself still present in his wonder-working relics. For them no receptacle could be too gorgeous or too costly; reverence for the saint would of itself prompt the destruction of his own building, if it could be replaced by one which the taste of the age deemed more worthy of sheltering the shrine which contained his bones. The church of Eadward was therefore destroyed by his own worshippers in his own honour. His special devotee, one might almost think his special imitator, Henry the Third, began that magnificent temple which, after so many ages, still remains unfinished. |Existing remains of Eadward’s buildings.| Of the domestic buildings of the abbey as raised by Eadward large portions were spared. The solid passages and substructures, built in the massive style of the time, remain almost perfect, and even of the more important buildings, as the refectory and dormitory, considerable traces still exist.^[1506] But the church itself, the central building of all, gradually gave way to the superb structure with which we are all familiar; nothing is left of Eadward’s minster save a few bases of pillars, and other fragments brought to light in various excavations and alterations of the present fabric. But we are not left without minute accounts of a structure which made a deep impression on men’s minds, and whose erection |His church the first great example of Norman architecture in England.| formed an æra in our national architecture. Among other importations from Normandy which we could well have spared, Eadward brought one with him which even our insular pride might be glad to welcome. The building art was now receiving daily improvements at the hands of the founders of those great Norman churches which were rising in such abundance on the other side of the sea. All those improvements Eadward carefully introduced into his new minster. He built his church in the newest style of the day, and it remained the great object of English imitation deep into the twelfth century.^[1507] Of the church thus built we have a description and a pictorial representation made while the charm of novelty was still fresh upon it.^[1508] It was a Norman minster of vast size, the increase of size in churches being one main distinction between the new Norman style and the older English manner of building. Its dimensions no doubt far surpassed those of any existing church in England, as they certainly far surpassed those of the contemporary church of Waltham. A short eastern limb, ending in an apse, contained the high altar. Over the choir rose, in Norman fashion, the central tower, seemingly surrounded at its angles by smaller turrets, and crowned by a cupola of wood and lead. The transepts projected north and south; to the west stretched the long nave, with its two ranges of arches, resting seemingly on tall columnar piers, like those of Jumièges, Gloucester, and Tewkesbury. Two smaller towers, for the reception of the bells, were designed as the finish of the building to the west.^[1509] On the erection of this vast and stately fabric, and on the other objects of his foundation, Eadward had for many years spent the tenth part of his royal revenues.^[1510] The monastic buildings had been finished for some years; the monks with their Abbot Eadwine^[1511] were already in possession of their house and its endowments. |The church finished. 1065.| The minster was meanwhile rising, and it was Eadward’s wish to interfere as little as possible with the worship which had still to be celebrated in the old building. The new church was therefore begun at some distance to the east of its doomed predecessor, which was doubtless not wholly demolished till the new one was completed.^[1512] In the foundation and endowment of the monastery the King found helpers among his subjects, the fallen Earl of the Northumbrians being among their number.^[1513] But the building of the church seems to have been wholly Eadward’s own personal work. At last the work of so many years was brought to perfection. The time employed on the building was indeed shorter than that bestowed on many other of our great churches, which their own Prelates had to rear out of their own resources. But here a King was pressing on the work with all his might, a King who, when he had once completed the great object of his life, was ready to depart in peace. After fourteen years from the receipt of the Papal dispensation the building was finished from the apse to the western front. By the time of the Midwinter festival of the year one thousand and sixty-five the new minster of Saint Peter stood ready for the great ceremony of its consecration.

So great a work, raised under such circumstances, could hardly fail to become surrounded by an atmosphere of legend. It was not every church that was founded either by a King or by a canonized saint. Fewer still among churches were founded by a King who was at once a canonized saint, the last of an ancient dynasty, and one whose memory was embalmed in the national recollection as the representative of the times before the evil days of foreign domination. In his lifetime, or at most within a few years after his death, Eadward was already deemed to be a worker of miracles.^[1514] For his dreams, visions, and prophecies he was renowned to his last moment. One story tells us how the holy King, with his pious friends Leofric and Godgifu, was hearing mass in the elder minster of Saint Peter; how the King was deep in devotion; how he and the Earl—Godgifu is no longer spoken of—saw the form of the divine Child in the hands of the ministering priest; how Eadward bade his friend keep his secret till after his death; how Leofric confided it only to a holy monk at Worcester, who revealed it to no man till Leofric and Eadward were both no more.^[1515] Another tale sets the King before us in all the Imperial pomp of the Easter festival; he goes with crown and sceptre from the church—in this case doubtless the Old Minster of Winchester—to the royal banquetting-hall. Heedless of the feast, absorbed in his own meditations, the King is seen to smile. Afterwards, in his private chamber, Earl Harold, a Bishop, and an Abbot, venture to ask him the reason of his serene and pious mirth. His thoughts had been far away from the royal hall of Winchester; he had seen the Seven Sleepers of Ephesos; they had turned from the right side to the left, an omen which presaged that some evil was coming upon the earth. The matter was deemed worthy of a special embassy to the Imperial Court of Constantinople, but the ambassadors took their commission, not from the King but from the three dignified subjects who had shared his confidence. Earl Harold sent a Thegn, the Bishop a clerk, the Abbot a monk. The three made their way to the New Rome and told the tale to the reigning Emperor. By his orders the tomb of the holy Sleepers at Ephesos was opened; the vision of the English King was proved to be true; and his prophetic powers were soon exalted by the general misfortunes of mankind, by the failure of the royal line of England and by the conquests of the Infidel Turks at the expense of Eastern |Legend of the ring.| Christendom.^[1516] One more tale will bring us back directly to the current of our story.^[1517] The King was present at the dedication of the church of Saint John at Clavering.^[1518] A beggar asks alms of his sovereign in the name of the patron of the newly hallowed temple, the Apostle whom Eadward reverenced next after his special patron Saint Peter. The King has neither silver nor gold about him; he cannot find his almoner for the press, he gives the poor man the only gift that he can give at the moment, the costly ring on his finger. The beggar returns thanks and vanishes. That very day,^[1519] two English pilgrims are benighted in a wilderness of the Holy Land. A band of bright youths appears, attending an old man before whom two tapers are borne as in the service of the Church. He asks the pilgrims from what land they come, and of what King they are subjects. They are Englishmen, subjects of the good King Eadward. For the love of good King Eadward he guides them to a city and an hostelry, where they find abundant entertainment. In the morning he reveals himself to them as John the Apostle and Evangelist; he gives them the ring to bear to the King of the English, with the message that, as the reward of his good and chaste life, he should within six months be with himself in Paradise. The message is delivered; the King’s alms and prayers and fastings are redoubled; but one thing specially occupies his mind, the longing to see the new minster of Saint Peter hallowed before he dies.