The International Monthly Magazine | Page 3

dedicating it to St. Peter, and vying with Pope Alexander in augmenting its privileges and its wealth.
Some of the abbots took great interest in home improvements, planting woods, conducting streams, enlarging ponds--building, now a mill, now a dove-cot, according to the wants of the abbey or their own fancies. Henry I. granted them permission to keep dogs, that, according to the old chronicle, they might take "hare, fox, and cats." King John, in the first year of his reign, gave them ample confirmation of all their privileges, which, it would seem, they had somewhat abused, for we find that the sovereign seized their manors of Egham and "Torp" (Thorp) on account of a servant of the abbot's having killed "Hagh de Torp." Oh, rare "old times!" The abbot was mulcted in a heavy fine. Then, while Bartholomew de Winchester was abbot, from 1272 until 1307, during the reign of our first Edward, complaints were made to Pope Gregory X. that the possessions of the abbey were alienated to civilians and laymen, whereupon the pope issued a bull ordering such grants to be revoked.
It is worthy of note, that the Chertsey monastery sheltered, for a time, the remains of the pious, but unfortunate, Henry VI.
"Poor key-cold figure of a Holy King, Pale ashes of the house of Lancaster."
And the reader of Shakespeare will recall the scene in which Richard meets the Lady Anne on her way to Chertsey with her husband's body. This poor king's remains had a claim to be well received by the monks of Chertsey Abbey, for he had granted to the abbot the privilege of holding a fair on St. Anne's-hill, then called Mount Eldebury, on the feast of St. Anne's (the 26th of July): the fair has changed its time and quarters as well as its patron, and is held in the town on the 6th of August, and called Black Cherry Fair. Manning, in his history of Surrey, says, that the tolls of this fair were taken by the abbot, and are now taken by the owner of the site of the Abbey House; thus the memory of King Henry VI. is commemorated in the town of Chertsey to this day, by the sale of black cherries in the harvest month of August!
[Illustration: "THE NUN'S WELL."]
"THE NUN'S WELL."
Centuries passed over those magnificent abbeys, whose ruins in many places add so much beauty to our fertile landscapes; they grew and grew, and added acre to acre, and stone to stone, and knowledge to knowledge; but most they cherished the knowledge which blazed like a lamp under a bushel, and kept all but themselves in darkness; they preached no freedom in Christ to the Christian world, they abolished no serfdom, they taught no liberty, they enslaved even those who in their turn enslaved their "born thralls," and saw no evil in it. Oh, rare old times! Better it is for us that the site of Chertsey Abbey should be scarcely traceable now-a-days than that it should be as it was, with its proud pageants and pent-up learning!--Yet we have neither sympathy no respect for that foul king, who, to serve his own carnal purposes, overthrew the very faith which had hallowed his throne. But he did not attack and storm the Abbey of Chertsey, as he did other religious houses. He came to them, this Eighth Harry, with a fair show of kindness, saying that "to the honor of God, and for the health of his soul, he proposed and most nobly intended to refound the late Monastery, Priory, or Abbey of Bisham in Berks, and to incorporate and establish the Abbot and Convent of Chertsey, as Abbot and Convent of Bisham, and to endow them with all the Manors late belonging to Bisham." How the then Abbot John Cordrey, and his brethren, must have shivered at the conditions; how they must have grieved at quitting their cherished home, their stews and fish-ponds, their rich meadows of Thorpe, overlooked by the woods of Eldebury hill, their nursing ground where their calves and young lambs were stowed in luxurious safety in the pleasant farm of Simple Marsh at Addlestone!
But their star was setting, and they were forced to "give, sell, grant and confirm, to the king their house and all manors belonging to them."
The total destruction of the Abbey must have amazed the whole country. An earthquake could hardly have obliterated it more entirely. Aubrey, writing in the year 1673, says "of this great Abbey, scarce any thing of the old building remains, except the out walls about it. Out of this ruin, is built a 'fair house,' which is now in possession of Sir Nicholas Carew, master of the Buckhounds." Dr. Stukeley alludes to this house, in a letter written in 1752; he speaks of the inveterate