The pagan storm which all but repeated in Britain the disaster of the Saxon invasions, which all but overcame the mystic tenacity of Alfred and the positive mission of the town of Paris, swept it completely.  Its abbot and its ninety monks were massacred, and it was not till late in the next century, about 950, that it arose again from its ruins.  It was deliberately re-colonised again from Abingdon, and from that moment onwards it grew again into power.  Donations poured upon it; one of them, not the least curious, was of land in Cardiganshire.  It came from those Welsh princes who were perpetually at war with the English Crown:  for religion was in those days what money is now—­a thing without frontiers—­and it seemed no more wonderful to the Middle Ages that an English monastery should collect its rents in an enemy’s land than it seems strange to us that the modern financier should draw interest upon money lent for armament against the country of his domicile.  Here also was first buried (and lay until it was removed to Windsor) the body of Henry VI.

The third of the great early foundations is Abingdon, and in a way it is the greatest, for, without direct connection with the Crown, by the mere vitality of its tradition, it became something more even than Chertsey was, wielding an immense revenue, more than half that of Westminster itself, and situated, as it was, in a small up-valley town, ruling with almost monarchical power.  There could be even less doubt in the case of Abingdon than there was in the case of Chertsey that it was the creator of its own district of the Thames.  It stood right in the marshy and waste spaces of the middle upper river, commanding a difficult but an important ford, and holding the gate of what was to be one of the most fruitful and famous of English vales.  It can only have been from Abingdon that the culture and energy proceeded which was to build up Northern Berkshire and Oxfordshire between the Saxon and the Danish invasions.  There only was established a sufficient concentration of capital for the work and of knowledge for the application of that wealth.

Like its two peers at Chertsey and at Westminster, Abingdon begins with legend.  We are fairly sure of its date, 675, but the anchorite of the fifth century, “Aben,” is as suspicious as the early Anglo-Saxon Chronicle itself, and still wilder are the fine and striking stories of its British origin, of its destruction under the persecution of Diocletian and of its harbouring the youth of Constantine.  But the stories are at least enough to show with what violence the pomp and grandeur of the place struck the imagination of its historians.