(2) The Hospital of St. Mary de Pre, for women-lepers, founded about fifty years after the above by Warren de Cambridge, twentieth abbot, on either side of the old Watling Street.  Some of the graves in the churchyard attached to the hospital were visible so recently as 1827, and the cottages known as the “Three Chimnies,” originally part of the hospital itself, were pulled down in 1849.[8]

[Footnote 8:  Vide Historical Records of St. Albans, by A. E. Gibbs, F.L.S., etc.; a most interesting little volume.]

(3) Sopwell Nunnery, founded by Abbot Geoffrey de Gorham about 1140, at a spot a little S. from the Old London Road, on the river Ver.  The masses of ivy-mantled ruins still to be seen, and usually called the “ruins of Sopwell Nunnery,” are, at least for the most part, the remains of the house built by Sir Richard Lee, to whom the manor was granted at the Dissolution.

ST. ALBANS ABBEY.—­The Abbey has been so repeatedly altered and restored that it may be said to illustrate every style of ecclesiastical architecture from Norman to the present time.  Opinions differ widely as to the merits of that scheme of renovation and innovation completed under the direction and by the munificence of Lord Grimthorpe, and no attempt will be here made to criticise or extol the work of so great an expert.  Such a description of the venerable Abbey as an architect might love to write would fill a volume in this series.  After careful consideration I have decided to sketch its history in such a way as to show, however imperfectly, how it came to be what it is.  I have been careful to compare many authorities and to follow the consensus of testimony wherever I have found discrepancy or contradiction.

It has already been stated that, according to Gildas, Bede and other authorities, a church was erected on Holmhurst Hill after the martyrdom of St. Alban.  Concerning that church we know little more than that it was almost destroyed by the Saxons.  In 793, or very near that date, Offa II., who had murdered the East Anglian King, Ethelbert, resolved to found a monastery, encouraged, as we learn from William of Malmesbury, by Charlemagne.  The monastery was duly founded, for an abbot and 100 Benedictine monks, and the little church, renovated, became the original abbey of the foundation.  Having discovered the bones of St. Alban and placed them in a costly reliquary, Offa conveyed them to this church, intending to erect a nobler edifice for their reception; but it is doubtful whether the design was carried out during his lifetime.  Indeed, we know little as to that enlarging and adornment of the church which must surely have been effected in the days of the early abbots, and the first hints of the erection of the great abbey occur in the lives of Ealdred and Eadmer, eighth and ninth abbots, who collected immense quantities of red, tile-like Roman bricks from the ruins of Verulam; Matthew Paris tells us that Eadmer made some progress in the actual rebuilding of the church.  The twelfth abbot, Leofstan (d. 1066), enriched the building with “certain ornaments”; but it was the fourteenth abbot, Paul de Caen (1077-97), who, using the vast stores of material collected by his predecessors, entirely rebuilt the church on a scale almost commensurate with its present size.