Recent Discoveries in the Abbey Church of St Austin at Canterbury

4 RECENT DISCOVERIES IN THE ABBEY CHTJKCH pope Leo IX., from whom he sought and obtained leave to carry out his purpose. One of the chroniclers, Gocelin, a contemporary inmate of the abbey, states that on his return home Wulfric accordingly " first demolished his temple," that is the great church, " from the front," or east end. Then he threw down also the western part of the oratory of the holy mother of God, together with the " porches " (porticibus) with which it was surrounded, and, when the cemetery of the brethren hard by had been cleansed, he takes the whole space between the two churches for the building, raises walls, and constructs columns and arches. Kent rejoiced in the new work, although the want of skill of the builders had made it unsuitable for a monastic habitation.* But the new work was not allowed to go on, for the Blessed Virgin, so write the chroniclers, was displeased with the destruction wrought on her chapel, and the unfortunate abbot was smitten with a disease from which he died in 1059. Wulfric's successor, Egelsin, did not attempt to finish or interfere with the new work, which remained as it was left until the coming of another abbot, Scotland by name, in 1070. This man (says the monk Gocelin), after he like the rest of his predecessors had been established in his monastery, when he began to put forth his great mind to the building of his church now further to he lengthened, was sorely troubled by the work already standing (and) awkwardly extended; he was troubled also by the narrow space for the proposed plan. He was afraid moreover of the judgement of the mother of God against the previous abbot for her church which he had overthrown: he was afraid of the danger of ruin with respect to the old monastery consumed by long decay. In the midst of these anxieties he is carried off to Rome on a royal embassy to pope * " templum suum a fronte diruit . . . . Partem quoque ab occidente oratorii sancte Dei Genetricis cum porticibus quibus circumcingebatur dejecit. et inter utramque ecolesiam fratrum cimiterio quod adjacebat purgato. totum spacium ad fabricam corripit. parietes erigit. columnas et arous componit. Letabatur novo opere Cantia. quamquam monastice habitaoioni incongruum fecisset artificum imperitia." Lib. ii, cap. iii, Cott. MS. Vesp. B xx, f. 127.