Page:St. Oswald and the Church of Worcester.djvu/9

, had not as yet been built. This stone structure remained till the time of King Edward (the Confessor), when Alfric, the brother of Bishop Beorhtheah (1033–8), desiring to enlarge the presbytery of St Peter's, pulled it down and used the materials for his building.

Here is a picture to the life, far more convincing than the story of Oswald's 'holy guile'—a parable of what was happening in the English Church of the second half of the tenth century. A great spiritual movement was in progress: the old limits were too narrow for the new enthusiasm. It was no 'purposeful neglect' which made Oswald leave the little sanctuary which had sufficed for the needs and the ambitions of the past: it was the call of the people who could find no room inside. And the old church was spared, as the wattle-church at Glastonbury had been spared, when church after church rose beside it; and as, nearly a century later, the old church of St Peter at Jumièges was spared, when the noble minster of St Mary was built beside it by Abbot Robert, whom Edward the Confessor afterwards brought to Canterbury. Oswald, who was one of the foremost spirits of the new movement, had been a monk at Fleury when that abbey, newly reformed, was at the height of its fame. His conceptions of the dignity of divine worship doubtless impelled him forward, and he would embrace with eagerness the opportunity of raising a great 'basilica', as he himself calls it, in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

We may now go back from these later authorities to Oswald himself, and read what he wrote in 983, when he had been bishop of Worcester for twenty-two years, and for half that time archbishop of York as well. These are the opening words of a charter (K. C. D. 637) issued in the year which had brought what he regarded as the crowning mercy of his life.

'The mercy of our Lord and our Redeemer ruling all the kingdoms of the whole world: He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory. So to me Oswald, Archbishop, though unworthy, He hath granted so great a boon of His loving-kindness, that beyond all my expectation I should bring to its completion the basilica which I have founded in my episcopal see, to wit in the monastery of Worcester, in honour of Mary, Mother of God, in the year of our Lord's Incarnation 983.'

We cannot fix with precision the year in which Oswald brought