File:The greater abbeys of England (1908) (14782697274).jpg

Identifier: greaterabbeysofe01gasq (find matches)
Title: The greater abbeys of England
Year: 1908 (1900s)
Authors: Gasquet, Francis Aidan, 1846-1929
Subjects: Abbeys
Publisher: New York, Dodd, Mead and company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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Tower-ing above the other buildings of the place rise whatRuskin somewhere calls the great cliff walls of theold abbey church. Looked at from any point of view—from the poor cress-grown little river Ver, or from therising ground to the south, or from the crumbling wallsof Roman Verulam—this great church stands out fromthe rest of the surroundings as an object not easily to beforgotten. In some ways it is unlike any other buildingin England; the long straight ridge of the roof, the long-est of any English church, is a fitting cresting to thecliffs of walls; the solid and almost sternly simple charac-ter of the transepts, especially as they appeared beforethe hand of the so-called restorer was heavy upon them,are fit supports for the low square central tower whichcrowns the vast buildings spreading out below it. Fromany point of view the church is truly stupendous! Butto those who know its history there is something sad andmelancholy about the solitary pile, as it stands now a (12)
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ST. ALBANS silent and majestic monument of what St. Albans oncewas in the days of its glory. Its walls once looked downupon a vast assemblage of buildings of which it was thecentre; towers and gables, courtyards and cloister; kitch-ens and guest-houses, stables and offices stretched out farover the space to the south and west, a veritable town ofconventual buildings. All these have vanished, alas!and to-day there remain of them only the broken anddefaced ruins of the old gatehouse; even the gloriouschurch itself was saved, in the rapacious days of HenryVIII, from becoming the common quarry of the neigh-bourhood, by the timely purchase of its desecrated wallsfor £400 by the people of the township. The story of St. Albans goes back to the close of theeighth century. About that time Offa, king of the Mer-cians, in recognition of his sins and in particular in expia-tion for the murder of Ethelbert, king of East Anglia,vowed to build a monastery for a hundred monks. Hechose the spot upon

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