I will next go to St. Alban’s; not that I can distinctly assert it to be
the next in date; but because it stood first in rank among abbeys, as
Canterbury among cathedrals; because it was built by the friend and
companion of Lanfranc; and because the crudeness of its material, by
divesting it of all decorative features, renders it a more purely
typical and elementary example than any other we possess.
Founded only ten years after the Dioclesian persecution, when St. Alban
became the proto-martyr of Britain,--destroyed during the invasions of
Pagan Saxons, and refounded as an abbey during the last years of the
eighth century by Offa, king of Mercia,--the church of St. Alban had
become famous throughout Christendom.
[Illustration: Fig. 245.--St. John’s Chapel, Tower of London. Capital.]
The two last Anglo-Saxon abbots having determined on its reconstruction,
had incurred great labour in excavating among the ruins of the adjacent
Roman city of Verulam to procure materials for the work; but a dreadful
famine, followed by the Norman invasion, had prevented the realisation
of their intentions.
[Illustration: St. John’s Chapel, Tower of London. Capitals.