Page:The Saxon Cathedral at Canterbury and The Saxon Saints Buried Therein.djvu/114

THE SAXON CATHEDRAL AT CANTERBURY The new buildings were dedicated in 738 by Archbishop Cuthbert, who also translated the relics of St. Mildred in 748 from the church of St. Mary to the new nunnery chapel which was dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul, where they were placed on the north side of the presbytery. The foundations of this chapel may yet be traced in time of drought in the south garden of Minster Abbey. Eadburga died in 751, and was buried in the church she had founded and built.

or was the 4th Abbess. She ruled from A.D. 751 to 791. At the present day we, unfortunately, know very little about her, except that she is described "as the holy virgin who for her sanctity was buried in the Cathedral by St. Dunstan." It was her misfortune to witness the first descent of the Danes upon Thanet, and almost every year after saw their inroad and ravages along the coast and often far inland. These began according to the chroniclers in 787, and resulted in constant afflictions and losses to the reduced and imperilled community, and according to the historian Thomas of Elmham "the flock wasted away from the deficiency of the pasture." Siburgis died in 791, having ruled the house for forty years, and was buried in the church or chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul, where her remains must have rested long after the burning and desolation of the abbey in the time of her successor, until the Archiepiscopate of St. Dunstan (960-988), who translated them to the Saxon Cathedral in Canterbury.

(791-840) was the 5th and last Abbess of Minster. She was consecrated by Archbishop Ethelhard (793-805), and made a vigorous attempt to restore the monastery to its pristine state by most energetic measures. In this she was assisted by Archbishop Wulfred (805–832), but all in vain, for the abbey was attacked and burnt by the Danes according to Thomas of Elmham somewhere about the year 838 or 839, and the Abbess with ninety of her nuns, servants and the priests and levites, who had taken refuge within the chapel, were burnt to death and the abbey totally destroyed. There were never more than five Saxon Abbesses at Minster, they were the number of the wise virgins in the parable, whom doubtless they greatly resembled.

The above is the story of the destruction of the abbey as told by Thomas of Elmham, but there is some doubt, not of the destruction of the abbey but of the massacre of the nuns, for at about this time an Abbess Seledritha is found at the more ancient abbey of Lyminge. This abbey was founded in A.D. 633, upon the ruins of a Roman building with a western apse, by Queen Ethelburga, daughter of Ethelbert, King of Kent, and widow of Edwin of Northumbria, when she fled into Kent after the death of her husband. The abbey was destroyed by the Danes in the ninth century, but it seems that Seledritha and her nuns had been received there soon after 804, when certain lands in Canterbury were conveyed to her by a 76