Now when I had well considered all this, not without an orison for that misguided King, I set off for Cadnam, and holding now only to the road, marching fast, for it was late, I came over the ridge beyond Black water into the valley of the Test, and so entered Romsey a little after it was dark.

[Illustration:  ROMSEY ABBEY]

Romsey, as I soon found on the following morning, has nothing at all to offer the traveller except one of the most solemn and noble Norman churches in all England, monastic too, for it was the church of the great Benedictine Nunnery of Our Lady of Romsey.  It is impossible to exaggerate the impression this astonishing Norman pile, of vast size and unsurpassed age and reverence, makes upon the traveller.  One seems in looking upon it to see before his eyes the foundation of England.  I cannot hope to describe it or to convey to another what it meant to me.  It is at once grandiose and reverent, of enormous, almost incredible size and weight and strength larger than many a cathedral, heavy as a kingdom, stronger than a thousand years.  It seems to have been hewn bodily out of the cliffs or the great hills.

It is enormously old.  The house was founded or perhaps refounded more than a millennium ago by Edward the Elder in 907; his daughter was abbess here, and here was buried.  In 967 Edgar his grandson gave the house to the Benedictines.  It remained English after the Conquest, for William seems not to have dealt with it and in 1086 the sister of Edgar Atheling became abbess.  Out of it Henry I. chose his bride that Abbess’s niece Maud a novice of Our Lady of Romsey.  Said I not well that it was as the foundation of England?

We know little of the Abbey for near a hundred years after that, and then in 1160 the daughter of King Stephen, Mary, whose uncle, Henry of Blois, was Bishop of Winchester, became abbess, and it was decided to rebuild the place.  Thus the great Norman church we have, arose in the new England of the twelfth century.  Mary, princess and abbess, was, however, false to her vows.  How long she was abbess we do not know, perhaps only a few months or even days.  At any rate, in the very year she became abbess, the year of her mother’s death,[Footnote:  See supra under Faversham.] she forsook her trust and married the son of the Earl of Flanders, and by him she had two daughters.  Then came repentance; she separated from her husband and returned to Romsey as a penitent.

The great religious house which had grown up thus with England, continued its great career right through the Middle Ages, about forty nuns serving there in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, though this number had dwindled to twenty-three at the time of the Surrender in 1539.  How this surrender was made we do not know; but whether with or without trouble the result was the same, the great convent was utterly destroyed.  Many of the lands passed to Sir Thomas Seymour, and the people of Romsey, who had always had a right to the north aisle of the church, which indeed they enlarged at their own expense in 1403, bought the whole from the Crown, for one hundred pounds, in 1554.