The Journey of Rheinfrid On the green skirts of the Forest of Arden there was a spot which the windings of the Avon stream had almost made into an island, and here in the olden time the half-savage herdsmen of King Ethelred kept vast droves of the royal swine. The sunny loops of the river cut clearings on the east and south and west, but on the north the Forest lay dense and dark and perilous. For in those ancient days wolves still prowled about the wattled folds of the little settlement of Wolverhampton, and Birmingham was only the rude homestead of the Beormingas, a cluster of beehive huts fenced round with a stockade in the depths of the woods. Among the swineherds of the King there was one named Eoves, and one day, while wandering through the glades of great oaks on this edge of the Forest, he saw three beautiful women who came towards him singing a song more strange and sweet than he had ever heard. He told his fellows, and the story spread far and wide. Some said that the three beautiful women were three goddesses of the old pagan world, and thought Eoves had acted very foolishly in not speaking to them. Others said they might have been the Three Fates, in whose hands are the lives of men, and the joy of their lives, and the sorrow they must endure, and the death which is the end of their days; and they thought that perhaps Eoves had been wise to keep silence. But when the holy Bishop Egwin heard the tale, he visited the place alone, and in the first glimmer of the sunrise, when all wild creatures are tame and the earth is most lovely to look upon, he beheld the three beautiful women, and he saw in a moment that they were the Virgin Mother Mary and two heavenly handmaidens. "And our Lady," he used afterwards to say, "was more white-shining than lilies and more freshly sprung than roses, and the savage forest was filled with the fragrance of Paradise." Straightway the Bishop sent his woodmen and had the aged oaks felled and the underwood cleared away; and on the spot where the beautiful women had stood a fair church was built for the worship of the true God, and around it clustered the cells of an abbey of Black Monks. In a little while people no longer spoke of the place by its old name, but called it Eovesholme, because of the vision of Eoves.