which owes its foundation to Roger de Montgomery, the first Norman Earl of Shrewsbury, and arose on the site of a small wooden church dedicated to St. Peter, built in the reign of Edward the Confessor, by Siward, a Saxon gentleman, then resident in Shropshire. The earl peopled his abbey with monks of the Benedictine rule, whom he invited over from a religious house founded on the estates of Mabel, his first Countess, at Seez, in Normandy. During his last illness the warlike founder entered himself a monk of his own foundation, and received the tonsure on the 14th July, 1094. He had previously obtained from the Abbey of Clugni, in Burgundy, the kirtle of St. Hugh, which holy vestment he occasionally wore, doubtless in anxious hope of its communicating some portion of the sanctity of its former possessor. Three days after his assumption of the monastic garb he breathed his last, and was honourably interred in the Lady Chapel, between the two altars. His son Hugh, the second earl, who was slain by Magnus, King of Norway, near Castell Aber Lleiniog, in Anglesea, in the year 1098, also received interment in the cloisters. On the confiscation of the Earldom of Shrewsbury, in the reign of Henry I., our Shrewsbury Abbots, became tenants in capite, and were thenceforth under the necessity, (as it was deemed in those days,) of attending the King in his Parliaments, as Barons or Peers of Parliament, which honour was continued to them by Edward III., who limited the number of mitred or Parliamentary Abbots to twenty-eight, and enjoyed by them down to the Dissolution. In 1137, during the Abbacy of Herbert the third Abbot, the monastery was enriched through the exertions of the prior, Robert Pennant, by the acquisition of the bones of the martyred Virgin St. Wenefrede, which were translated from their burial place at Gwytherin, in Denbighshire, and placed with becoming solemnity in a costly shrine, prepared for their reception in the Abbey church. To this shrine, countless numbers of pilgrims and diseased persons continually resorted to pay their devotions, and to experience cures, which, according to assertion, must have been little less than miraculous; and the wealthy vied with each other in the costliness of their offerings. In addition to these treasured bones, the Monks appear to have possessed, in the reign of Henry II., a most extensive and varied assortment of other reliques, doubtless of equal value and efficacy. In 1486, the Abbot Thomas Mynde, incorporated the devotees, both male and female, of St. Wenefrede, into a religious Guild or fraternity founded by him in her honour. A great bell was also dedicated to her memory.