![]() With the destruction of the enormous abbey the whole place collapsed in a general ruin: the Martyr's bones met with the fate of the sacred pile that held them, and not a stone is now left to tell where they lie. To this fair creation of the great Middle-Age the Dissolution was, as historians tell us, the death-knell. The bones of King Edward "the Martyr," carefully removed hither for holy preservation, brought Shaston a renown which made it the resort of pilgrims from every part of Europe, and enabled it to maintain a reputation extending far beyond English shores. The spot was the burial-place of a king and a queen, of abbots and abbesses, saints and bishops, knights and squires. ![]() Vague imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magnificent apsidal abbey, the chief glory of South Wessex, its twelve churches, its shrines, chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions-all now ruthlessly swept away-throw the visitor, even against his will, into a pensive melancholy, which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless landscape around him can scarcely dispel. (as Drayton sang it), was, and is, in itself the city of a dream. Milton.įrom whose foundation first such strange reports arise, ![]() "Whoso prefers either Matrimony or other Ordinance before the Good of Man and the plain Exigence of Charity, let him profess Papist, or Protestant, or what he will, he is no better than a Pharisee."- J. ![]() Part IV, Chapter I Part Fourth At Shaston ![]()
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