Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/344

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into the King's hands. One stronghold only was now left to Henry, one of the two which had been specially marked out to be taken from him, the monastic fortress of Saint Michael. The sacred mount was then famous and venerable through all Normandy, and far beyond the bounds of Normandy. Of that vast and wondrous pile of buildings, halls, cloister, church, buildings which elsewhere stand side by side, but which here are heaped one upon another, little could then have been standing. The minster itself, which crowns all, had begun to be rebuilt seventy years before by the Abbot Hildebert, and it may be that some parts of his work have lived through the natural accidents of the next age and the destruction and disfigurement of later times. But the series of pillared halls, knightly and monastic, which give its special character to the abbey of the Mount, are all of far later date than the war of the three brothers. Yet the house of the warrior archangel was already at once knightly and monastic. The reigning abbot Roger was, in strict ecclesiastical eyes, a prelate of doubtful title. He had come in—as countless other bishops and abbots of Normandy and England had come in—less by free election of the monks than by the will of the great