which each of them dwelt; and they were expected to wear the mark of distinction. Now, doubtless, this was all very pretty; and we occasionally hear and read what sounds like a hankering after this sort of foppery. But let us hope there will be no more of it. We have had too much of such nonsense already. Let small littérateurs long after stars and ribbons, and wear them if they can get them, our brawny peasantry are better without them. For a match at wrestling, or single-stick, or cricket, a prize of ribbons is well enough. There the merit is palpable, and none can question the award. But we want no aids to moral pride, nor any stimulant to envy. We don't want the I um better than thou spirit to be fostered. A fussy, ostentatious, pharisaic goodness, or a sort of prim starched propriety, may be thus coddled into a rickety existence, and by stays and irons be kept upright; but a healthy manly virtue cannot be engendered, nor by such means be nourished. Grievously do the morals of our villagers need to be elevated, but it is not by these holiday modes that it can be accomplished. To write over the door of the best behaved man, "Here lives Job Winfarthing, the soberest and most virtuous man in the village," and to deck him with a ribbon and medal, would not be any more likely to make him better, or to improve his neighbours than the Agricultural club's awarding a blue coat and wheatear buttons, or a white frock and corderoy inexpressibles, to the labourer who has raised a dozen children on six shillings a week without parish help, is likely to lead other labourers to be equally prudent and praiseworthy. SO It has been said that Nuneham-Courtnay is much resorted to by the inhabitants of Oxford; it should be added that the grounds are now, as they always have been, liberally and freely thrown open to all A picturesque cottage was erected by the Earl for the accommodation of such holiday visitors: it stands beside a branch of the Thames, across which a rustic bridge was at the same time thrown. comers. A short and pleasant walk by the river, which may be shortened by a cut across the fields, will bring us to Abingdon before the daylight is quite gone. CHAPTER VII. ABINGDON. QUIET, clean, and dull is Abingdon now, like many another old town whose small manufacturing trade has departed, leaving it dependent on agriculture for what business is done in it. On market-days it wakes a little from its somnolent condition, but the market is soon over, and it at once relapses into its usual drowsihood. Abingdon is not a place a stranger would long to make his permanent abode, yet something of interest might be found in it for a day or two. Its situation is not striking, nor is the neighbourhood of it remarkable for beauty, yet both are pleasant:-standing near the junction of the Ock with the Thames, where the Thames is not the most picturesque, it still possesses some agreeable features, and some diversity of scenery. Once it was a place of considerable importance. A manuscript in the Cottonian library, quoted in Dugdale's Monasticon, describes it as being anciently a large and wealthy city, where was the residence of the Mercian kings; and whither people resorted to assist at the great councils of the nation. Long previous to the introduction of Christianity it was, if we may trust the same authority, a British station. As its subsequent fame was long owing to the connexion of the monastery with it, it may not be amiss to notice its foundation. In the reign of Kentwin, King of the West Saxons, who died in 686, Cissa, one of his viceroys, or his nephew Heane, or both jointly, founded a monastery in honour of the Virgin Mary, for twelve monks of the Benedictine order, Heane being made their first abbot. The site of the monastery was, it is said, a hill called Abendune, near Bayworth, in the adjoining parish of Sunningwell. After the death of Kentwin, Kentwell, his son and successor, not only confirmed to Heane and his monks the grant of their monastery, but gave to them the town of Seovechesham, with all its appendages-a right royal gift. And he was further pleased to command that the town should henceforth be called Abendon, after the place whereon the abbey then stood. This is the statement of a monkish writer of the thirteenth century, but it is probably, in part at least, fabulous. The name most likely arose, as Camden suggests, from its connexion with the abbey Abbendon signifying the abbey-town. During the reign of Ethelwulf, the brother and predecessor of the great Alfred, and in the early part of Alfred's own reign, the Danes overran and ravaged the larger part of Berkshire. The monastery of Abingdon was destroyed by them, but it was Alfred himself who completed the ruin of the poor monks, by taking from them their town and all their estates, as a punishment for not having resisted the enemy with sufficient zeal. His grandson Edred gave the ruined abbey to Ethelwoldknown by his contemporaries as the "father of monks," and by posterity as Saint Ethelwold-who was then a monk at Glastonbury. Ethelwold, with a few of his brethren, removed to Abingdon, : |