This extract is not very satisfactory. It does not appear to me that the device on the Dovor bell answers to that given on the others referred to; but this question I must leave to the learned. Certainly this one has not the prayer mentioned; and it will be satisfactory to us if some gentleman can speak with authority about it. It has evidently been gilded. The meetings of the old, unreformed Corporation (of which the writer was a member) were always held in private, and this bell was used to summon the Mayor's serjeant in attendance at the door.

The seals of the Mayor and Corporation I need only refer to. The explanation of them happily falls into better hands; but I will just observe that the large seal of the Barons of Dovor has a date upon the back of one division of it. The figures have been partially defaced; and I have the authority likewise of Mr. Francks for saying there is no doubt that the date is 1305, and it is therefore to be assigned to the reign of King Edward I.

The small silver oar enclosed in a brass case was the water-bailiff's oar. The deputy bearing this oar had authority to board ships within the jurisdiction, and make arrests. I know of no authority for fixing a date to it; but I presume it may be assigned to the time when the Mayor and Corporation had the grant of office under the charter of Queen Anne. The present oar has the Hall-mark of George III. The brass case is probably of an earlier date than that. Does the Hall-mark necessarily affix the date of manufacture? Or may the Hallmark have been impressed subsequently?

The gold chain and badge worn by the Mayor for the time being was presented to the Corporation in the year 1868 by Sir W. H. Bodkin, the late (and for many years) Recorder of the Borough. He first held the office (then denominated Steward) under the Corporation prior to the Municipal Reform Act, 1834.

ST. AUGUSTINE'S ABBEY, CANTERBURY.

BY THE REV. J. ORGER, M.A.

(Read August 23, 1883.)

THE Monastery of St. Augustine was one of the two earliest institutions of the English Church. The chief of the more ancient printed materials for its history, besides the passages in Bede relating to it, and the documents in Dugdale and similar collections, are-1, The Chronicle of William Thorne, who was one of its monks. It ends with the year 1397, and was printed by Sir Roger Twisden in the Decem Scriptores. 2, a Chronicle without the author's name, but attributed, on the strength of internal evidence, by Archdeacon Hardwicke, who edited it for the Master of the Rolls, to Thomas of Elmham, at one time monk and treasurer of St. Augustine's; but who joined the Cluniac order, and became Prior of Lenton, in Nottinghamshire, in 1414, at which time his account of this Abbey comes to an end. The work is unfinished, but it contains a chronological table covering the whole history down to that year, and carried on, in another hand, to the year 1418. It is well known to antiquaries by the title of The Trinity Hall MS., having been presented to that College in the early part of the seventeenth century. Light also is thrown on the relations of Christ Church and St. Augustine's by the Chronicle of Gervaise, a monk of Christ Church, which was edited by Twisden.1

The principal unpublished source of information is The Red Book of Canterbury, belonging to the British Museum, "a magnificent array of charters and other muniments belonging to St. Augustine's." Among more modern sources may be mentioned Somner's Antiquities of Canterbury, and his editor Battely; Hasted's History of Kent, vol. iv; Stanley's Memorials of Canterbury. Of quite recent date is Mr. Mackenzie Walcott's paper in vol. xxxv, Part I, of the Journal of this Association. It is 2 Ibid., p. xxxv.

1 Hardwicke's Introduction, p. xviii.

learned and useful, but confused, and sometimes inaccurate. I see references to Mr. Dunkin's Report of this Association for 1844, but I have had no opportunity of consulting it.

The monks of this Abbey and of Christ Church used to dispute on the point of priority in foundation. There could, in any case, have been only one or two years difference. They were both practically of the same date, and the immediate result of the success of St. Augustine's mission; we may therefore acquiesce in the date claimed in our chronicles, of 597. Ethelbert's Dotatio (charter of endowment), however, is referred to in the year 605, which was also that of St. Augustine's death. The consecration of the church by his successor, St. Laurence, took place in 813, when his body, which lay outside, was placed within.

The Abbey owed its foundation to the desire of providing a burial-place for the converts to the Christian faith in Canterbury, and of placing it under suitable guardians. It was a settled point that it was to be without the town walls. Somner suggests that a reminiscence of the Law of the Twelve Tables, forbidding the burial of a dead man within the city, led to this determination. The Dotatio of Ethelbert (believed, however, not to be genuine) says that St. Augustine commanded that himself and his successors should be buried here, "Scripturâ dicente, non esse civitatem mortuorum sed vivorum." It does not use the term "Sacra Scriptura". It may mean, therefore, to give the spirit of the prohibition of the Roman law in words altered from those of the New Testament. The actual site included the desecrated church which St. Augustine dedicated to St. Pancras; and it has been thought by Battely and Dean Stanley,' that lying, as this did, between the city and St. Martin's, it affected the choice of situation. The ground set apart for the cemetery lay on either side of the Deal Road. This was not likely to escape Dr. Stanley. "Augustine the Roman", he says, "fixed his burial-place by the side of the great Roman Road which then ran from Deal to Canterbury, over St. Martin's Hill, and entered the town

1 Landing of St. Augustine.

by the gateway which still marks the course of the old road. The cemetery of St. Augustine was an English Appian Way (as the church of St. Pancras was an English Cælian Hill); and this is the reason why St. Augustine's Abbey, instead of the Cathedral, has enjoyed the honour of burying the last remains of the first Primate of the English Church, and of the first King of England."

This position outside the walls exposed the Abbey to danger. In some way or other it seems, however, to have always escaped. The monks probably purchased their safety from the Danes; but on the occasion of their terrible devastation of Kent in 1011, when they entered Canterbury, and carried off the Archbishop Alphage a prisoner to Greenwich, where they killed him, St. Augustine's was delivered, according to Thorne, through the miraculous punishment of a Dane who had laid sacrilegious hands on the covering of the altar. But the AngloSaxon Chronicle states that the Danes let the Abbot Elfmar go free because he had betrayed the city to them.

The Abbey was in the first place dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul, in which we trace again not only the preeminence of these two Apostles, but the estimation in which they were held at Rome. It is by this title, "The Church and Monastery of St. Peter and Paul", that Bede speaks of it. But in 978 St. Dunstan united St. Augustine himself in the dedication, and the style of the Monastery received its full proportions, "Monasterium S. Petri et Pauli Apostolorum, necnon S. Augustini Apostoli Anglorum, extra et juxta muros.

Owing to the fact that the greater number of the Christian Kings of Kent, beginning with Ethelbert and his Queen Bertha, were buried here, and the first ten Archbishops, including St. Augustine, the apostle of the English, and that here was the burial-place originally for all Canterbury, the Abbey was regarded with great reverence. seems to have had precedence, in popular esteem, of the Cathedral, which had not been from the first, and uninterruptedly, monastic, and did not contain the remains of persons of regnal distinction. It lost, indeed, the privi

1 Memorials, p. 25. 8vo.

It

lege of being the burial-place of the Archbishops in 758, through the contrivance of Archbishop Cuthbert. He gave orders that upon his death he should be quietly buried within the walls of Christ Church, and that no hint of his decease should be given for two or three days. Thus, when the bells tolled, and the Abbot and his monks went to Christ Church, according to custom, to convey the body of the Archbishop to his grave at St. Augustine's, they were informed that he was already buried, and returned in great indignation; and soon after this the line of the kings of Kent became extinct; but the Abbey continued to hold the first place in men's esteem till the fate of Becket turned the heart of England, and in some degree of all Christendom, to the scene of his martyrdom and burial.

Still St. Augustine's was ecclesiastically subject, in a manner, to Christ Church, in the person of the Archbishop, who was its head. Thus the Archbishop appointed the Abbot up to the Norman conquest, and bestowed the benediction on him in the Cathedral, after receiving his profession of canonical obedience. Abbot Silvester, in 1151, was the first to obtain from the Pope an injunction on the Archbishop to give him the benediction at St. Augustine's, and to dispense with the promise of canonical obedience. It was obeyed with the greatest reluctance, and the privilege was not maintained in full by his successors. Abbot Roger in 1179 obtained a similar injunction from the Pope; but the Archbishop refused his benediction on those conditions, and no other English bishop would consent to act for him. Roger was forced to go to Rome to receive benediction from the Pope himself. After this it seems to have been commonly the custom for the Abbots to receive it at Rome; but the release from professing obedience to the Archbishop was purchased by much trouble and expense.

The two foundations, Christ Church and St. Augustine's, both being wealthy, and neighbours, each having its distinct grounds for claiming pre-eminence, carried on a perpetual struggle. This began early, and lasted to the end. To illustrate this painful jealousy between brothers,

1 Calcott, p. 55.

2 Hardwicke, Introd., p. xiii.