Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/370

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London was visited by a fearful wind, which blew down seven churches and houses to the number of six hundred. Above all, the wooden roof of the church of Saint Mary-le-bow was carried off, and its beams were hurled to the ground with such force that they were driven into the hard earth, and had to be sawn off as they stood. Two men who were in the church were crushed. The citizens could have hardly repaired their houses before another blow came upon them. Early in the next year the greater part of London was destroyed by fire. By Eastertide the cathedral churches of two of the dioceses whose seats had been moved in the late reign stood ready for consecration. On the waterless hill which then was Salisbury, within the everlasting ditches of the elder time, looking down on the field of battle which had decreed that Britain should be English and on the field of council which had decreed that England should be one, Norman Osmund, the doctor of the ritual lore of England, had finished the work which Lotharingian Hermann had began. The new mother church of the lands of Berkshire, Wiltshire, and Dorset, the elder minster of Saint Mary, whose stones were borne away to build the soaring steeple of its successor but whose foundations may still be traced on the turf of the forsaken city, now awaited its hallowing. There was thensubita et tristia acciderunt," and notes this year as specially marked by "tumultus fulgurum, motus turbinum."]