Nor was the element of learning wanting.  The Benedictines were indeed the scholars of Europe, and some hundred boys were educated, free of cost, at Abingdon—­the cloisters in summer serving as their classrooms.  And let me tell my schoolboy readers, the fare and the discipline were alike very hard.

But the chapel in great abbeys—­like the one we are writing about—­resembled a cathedral rather than a college chapel.  And he who has the general plan of a cathedral in his mind can easily imagine the abbey church of St. Mary’s at Abingdon.

The choir was devoted to the monks alone; the nave and aisles apportioned to the laity; the side chapels contained altars dedicated to special saints, and occasional services.

Such was the building into which Etienne de Malville entered, not without religious awe, as the pealing organ—­then recently introduced by the Normans—­rolled its volume of sound through the vaulted aisles.

The monks were all in the choir, which was lighted by torches and tapers.  In the nave a few laity of the town were scattered—­here a knight or soldier, there a mechanic.

Suddenly, as Etienne took his place, the tread of many armed heels broke the silence, and penetrated up the aisle.

The sound ceased; those who caused it were already in their chosen places, and the monks had begun the Psalms, when Etienne heard a peculiarly stern and deep voice near at hand taking up the sacred words of Israel’s royal singer, with which the worshipper seemed familiar.

Then, for the first time, he perceived that the Conqueror—­the mightiest of earth’s warriors—­was he from whom the voice proceeded, kneeling without state in the midst of his subjects, lords and vassals, to join in the late evening service of the church {xix}.

CHAPTER XIX.  AN INTERVIEW WITH THE CONQUEROR.

The mighty Conqueror of England was the central figure of the age in which he lived—­the greatest soldier of an age of soldiers, and not less statesman than warrior.

Born to a life of warfare, the Conquest had been but the culminating point of a career spent in the tented field—­but on that one event he staked his all.

For had he been vanquished at Senlac there was no hope of flight; the English commanded the sea, while his suzerain of France, ever on the watch to regain those Norman dominions which Rollo had won, would have taken instant advantage of the loss of its military leaders to re-annex Normandy to the French crown, and must have succeeded.

Had William fallen in England the Norman name and glory would have perished at Hastings.

Doubtless, he felt how great was the stake he had placed at the hazard of the die, and having won it, he used it as his own.

Yet he was not all of stone.  The Anglo-Saxon chronicler says of him—­“He was mild to those good men who loved God, although stern beyond measure to those who resisted his will.”