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the door of the pavilion being opened, I saw the corpse of the holy virgin had been taken from the tomb, and was lying on a bed, like to one who slept. They then uncovered her face, and showed me the cicatrice of the incision I had formerly made, and how wonderfully the wound had healed so as only to present the thinnest scar, instead of being wide and open. All the linen too in which the body had been buried, appeared as whole and fresh as if it had only just then been wrapt about her, and moreover a marvellous virtue was soon found to attach to the clothes as well as to the coffin. The first had a power of expelling devils from persons possessed, and of curing certain distempers; of the latter it was said that some, who had diseased eyes, were immediately relieved by praying with their heads placed against it. These miraculous gifts were generally supposed to be signs of heavenly favour for her having remained a virgin although twice married, and each time to a king."

Miracles also attended the search for stone to make her new coffin. As the country of Ely supplied no stone of size sufficient for the purpose, the abbess ordered some of the brethren to go abroad and seek for the requisite materials, whereupon they set sail,-Ely at that time was completely surrounded with water and marshes, and voyaged till they came to a small, desolate town, called Grantecester. Here by a chance, which they set down for a special interference of providence in their behalf, they found at no great distance from the walls a white marble coffin beautifully wrought, with a lid of the same substance and ornamented in the same manner. Having thus achieved the object of their journey they returned to the Abbess, when by a second miracle the coffin was found to exactly fit the body of Etheldrid, the cavity even for the head being exactly of her size.

While the Anglo-Saxon kings were buried in linen, the clergy as a mark of distinction were committed to the tomb in their sacerdotal vestments. In some instances, when religion assumed its most gloomy form, men provided their own coffins in anticipation of death. Thus king Sebbi, having received the sacerdotal habit, and being warned in a vision of the time when he was to die, caused his coffin to be made for him beforehand. But by some mistake it proved too short for him, and, what was yet more strange, enlarge it as they would, it was still unable to contain

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the body. Suddenly, however the stone extended itself, and to such a degree that it would now admit of a pillow being inserted under the head. Thus also when bishop John, a very holy man and famed for miraculous cures, went to visit a sick servant of Earl Addi, he found the man with a coffin standing ready at his bed-side, in case it should be wanted.

The place of burial, in like manner, was frequently chosen for themselves by the living. Many instances of this occur, a morbid familiarity with death and its funeral appearances, being a predominant feature in the religion of the Anglo-Saxons, the duties, no less than the pleasures of the present life, being often totally neglected and forgotten in their aspirations after a future state. Still nature would at times assert her rights, and we see friends and relatives attending about the bed of sickness with the usual sympathies, or mourning them, when dead, in all the bitterness of tears, as happened in the case of king Elfwin. When the body of the slain monarch was carried to York, all the people wept bitterly, tearing their hair and rending their garments in token of excessive sorrow.

The time that elapsed between the death of any one and his burial would seem to have been regulated in a degree by circumstances. Bede gives us an instance of a man being buried the day after his decease, but we have not sufficient grounds for believing that this was an usual custom.

There can be no doubt that in the earlier periods of AngloSaxon rule the bodies of the dead were interred at some distance from towns and cities. This custom, moreover, must have continued long after the introduction of Christianity, for we find Cuthbert, the eleventh Bishop from Augustine, soliciting and obtaining leave to make cemeteries within cities. An opening for this unhealthy practice having been thus made, it soon became general, and then certain restrictions were ordained, wise and wholesome in themselves, but defended by calling in the help of the grossest superstition. No enemies of the Church, nor notorious malefactors were to be buried within the holy walls, because of the horrible cries that were often uttered by them, and of the evil spirits thus let loose 'till such offenders were dug up, and cast forth from the cemetory. Many monks even were found not

sufficiently strict of life for admission here when dead, and Heaven itself would often interpose to forbid their unhallowed in-. trusion. So sacred was the ground within the Church-walls; that whoever brought into it a horse or falcon would be sure to suffer in his own person, or by the death of the creature he had so unholily introduced. Many instances occur in the pages of Anglo-Saxon history. In the reign of King Edgar a certain count, by name Arnulph, brought a hawk with him into the church, when the bird, dropping from his wrist, expired. At another time the cook of Abbot Hetelewin ignorantly leading his horse into the sacred cemetery, it on the sudden fell down dead. Many also lost their dogs in the same manner, and we learn besides from the "Book of Ecclesiastical Laws" that corn, hay, and other things equally unsuited to the place, were deposited in the churches. A curious picture this of the rude manners of the time, and which would almost incline us to believe the people were but half christianized, or were fast relapsing into a contempt of all religion. In this state of things may be found a reason, if not an excuse, for the monstrous fictions we have been just detailing. To have appealed to the understandings of so ignorant a race, to have told them that a church was neither a stall for horses, nor a roosting place for falcons, nor yet a granary nor a hay-loft, would have been manifestly fruitless; the wiser monks attacked them on the side of superstition, and they attained their object. It would indeed have been far better to have cultivated the minds and reformed the habits of the people, but for this they were not themselves sufficiently enlightened; having in their hands a remedy of so great power, and of such immediate efficacy, they were like some medical empirics content to get rid of a present ill, without much thought of the new, and perhaps worse, disease engendered by their specific. A less doubtful proceeding was the enactment of a law by which burial in the church-cemetery was forbidden to all who could not say their Pater-Noster and their Credo, thus placing ignorance in the same category with licentiousness and evil living.

Another important custom connected with funerals was the Sawl-Sceat, or Soul-Shot, a payment made to the clergy in consideration of their prayers for the weal of the soul after its separation from the body. Sometimes this gift consisted in land or

gold; at others in ornaments, in gems, in silver, very frequently in crosses of the precious metals, and even in garments and bedclothes. Many gave the soul-shot in their life-time; more bequeathed it by will; but in any case it was considered so essential to happiness hereafter that we actually see gilds formed for the express purpose of creating a fund for such a purpose. Great indeed was the anxiety of all classes amongst the Anglo-Saxons that their bones should rest as near as possible to the altar, or in the vicinity of those pious men, whose prayers had kept the evil one at a distance from them in life, and whose nearness in the grave might reasonably be supposed to afford a shield against him at a time when it was most needed. Were not their bones holy? did they not work miracles? Were not many of them exalted to the company of saints whose intercession their religion allowed to be availing? True it is that they believed the soul quitted the body at the time of death to lie in limbo or purgatorial fires, but by that confusion of ideas, which always accompanies superstition, they seem in these instances to have had as much care for the lifeless body as if it had still been the dwelling of the spirit. Yet even here we must not too hastily condemn; the error, such as it was, proceeded from the best and kindliest feelings of our common nature, and which are still as powerful as amongst our ignorant forefathers; we consecrate the ground in which the deserted body lies, we pile upon it costly monuments, or decorate its humble home with flowers; and Heaven forbid that it should be ever otherwise, that a cold and heart-numbing philosophy should persuade us to fling aside the earthly vesture as if it were a worn out woollen garment!

We have now accompanied the Anglo-Saxons through all the various stages of life, from the cradle to the grave, and even beyond it to the world of his belief when the soul had passed the gates of death, and entered upon its new existence. We have seen him in the field and the cottage, in the banquet-hall and the palace, in health and sickness, in peace and war, and under every aspect he presents himself as a rude but strong-minded man, fond of sensual enjoyment but ever ready at the first sound of the wartrumpet to start up and unsheathe his sword, patient and persevering beyond all other people, and of a sluggish imagination, but yet which, when once excited and fairly called into action,

was capable of the highest flights. With all this, nothing could be more fortunate as regards himself and after ages than the conquest of Saxon England by William and his gallant Normans, great as were the evils it inflicted at the moment. And when was any signal or lasting good brought about in this world without some intermixture of evil, if not by its actual agency? From death cometh life, decay itself is the active servant of vitality, which springs from its dust, its ashes, and its corruption. In this case no doubt the Normans moistened the ground with blood instead of water, but the seeds, they had sown, produced a glorious harvest. These descendants of Rollo had the very qualities in which the conquered people were most deficient, a contempt for merely sensual pleasure, a more cultivated understanding, a romantic spirit that happily tempered their fierceness, and a keen apprehension of whatever contributes to the graces and elegancies of life. When time had amalgamated the two races, fused these opposing elements into one mass, the result was a people, who with no larger a domain than the small island of Britain, could bid defiance to the whole world in arms, and who soon came to equal if they did not surpass the rest of Europe in literature and science, and all that tends to elevate man above the brute creation, and to fit him for that high station which Providence has assigned him. We have only to compare the results of the Roman Conquest with those of the Norman subjugation of the island, to form a just estimate of what is owing to the latter. The Romans found a brave though uncivilized race, and they left them not more cultivated, but so stript of energy and warlike spirit as to be unable to defend themselves against the marauding Scots and Picts. The Normans, on the contrary, found the Anglo-Saxons much degenerated from the noble qualities of their ancestors, and raised them to be the conquerors of France in many a hard-fought field; they taught them to take a position amongst the nations of Europe, which they have since maintained and augmented, while their enemies for more than a century have been prophesying that they had reached their zenith, and must speedily fall to rise no more like Carthage and ancient Babylon.

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