Page:The Saxon Cathedral at Canterbury and The Saxon Saints Buried Therein.djvu/72

THE SAXON CATHEDRAL AT CANTERBURY  Church. He constantly frequented the places where relics of the Archbishops were kept, to pray there, and to celebrate Mass before them: and was wont to ask all manner of questions as to whom this or that one had been and what might be the name of the one whose remains rested in this or that coffin; at length he conceived a vehement desire to obtain the body of St. Breogwine, and take it to his own country, intending, as he said, to found a monastery under the Saint's patronage. He had even obtained the consent of the Archbishop, and was making interest with the King through the Queen, for this purpose. The Archbishop at last thought better of the matter, and repented of his treason to Christ Church; thereupon the monk started to go to Woodstock to complain to the Queen but, on his journey, became ill and died in London. The monks at Christ Church were, however, now on their guard and to make such an attempt more difficult in future, they removed the relics of St. Breogwine and also those of Archbishop Plegmund (who had died in 914) to the south part of the Church and there decently entombed them behind the southern altar (St. Gregory's) in the South East Transept."

It is remarkable that though there were relics of this sainted Archbishop in the Cathedral, and he is mentioned in the Canterbury Martyrology, his name does not occur in the thirteenth-century Kalendar to be found in Register K, fol. xix., of the Cathedral records; nor is it in the Kalendar of the Archdeacon of Canterbury's Black Book, which is a secular Kalendar of early fifteenth-century date. Neither is it entered in either of the kalendars to be found at Lambeth, that in the Psalter of John Hollingbourne, a monk of Christ Church of the thirteenth century, nor in Archbishop Chichele's copy of the Sarum Breviary.

The relics of St. Breogwine rested behind the altar of St. Gregory, from about the year 1121 till the Dissolution. They are mentioned as "Bregwyn; modo jacet in altari sancti Gregorii ex australi parte chori" in a list of relics in a manuscript of the time of Archbishop Warham preserved amongst the Parker MSS. in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (MS. 298). 42