[1] In the year 967, Eadgar the Peaceable, King of the English, placed nuns in the monastery which his grandfather, Eadward the Elder, King of the English, had built, and appointed St. Meriwenna abbess over them. This Eadward, also surnamed the Unconquered, was the son and successor of the greatest of the Old English Kings, AElfred, and reigned from 901 to 925. Sometime during his reign he founded the Romsey nunnery. There is no documentary evidence to fix the exact date, but it is generally assumed to have been 907. It is said that about two centuries earlier there had been a monastery at Nursling nearer the mouth of the Test, and on the tideway of the river. It was here that the great missionary to the Germans Winfrid or St. Boniface had been trained, but it was within reach of the ships of the Danish pirates, and in 716 they had ravaged it and reduced it to such utter ruin that scarcely one stone remained on another to mark the site. This monastery was never rebuilt, and Eadward, probably having its fate in mind, now chose a safer position for the new foundation, for the river at Romsey was too shallow to allow of the seagoing vessels of the marauding Danes to reach it. Eadward's eldest daughter AElflaed and her sister AEthelhild both adopted the religious life, and lived for a time at the monastery at Wilton. Here AEthelhild was buried, while AElflaed was buried at Romsey. Their half-sister St. Eadburh became abbess of St. Mary's Abbey at Winchester; and it is highly probable that AElflaed ruled as abbess over the sister establishment at Romsey. Probably this was only a small religious community. Whether it was continued or not when she died no record remains to tell, but, as we have seen, it was refounded by Eadgar the Peaceable in 967, and on Christmas day of the year 974 St. Meriwenna was put in charge of the completed Abbey, which was constituted according to the Benedictine Rule. Some traces of this church still remain, though only discovered in 1900. Under the pavement of the present church, immediately below the tower, the foundations of an apsidal east ending of a church were found; now as it is well known that this is a Norman form for the east end, it must not be supposed that this apse was built in the time of Eadgar, but it very probably occupied the same position as the choir of his church. Other foundations were then looked for and found. And as a result of this investigation, it appears that the nave of Eadgar's church extended as far to the west as the fourth bay of the present nave, that its crossing lay immediately to the west of the present transept, and that the apsidal choir was as wide as the present nave, and extended eastward as far as the screen now dividing the choir from the transept. Thus the total interior length of the church was about 90 ft. instead of about 220 ft., the length of the present building. Although the church was comparatively small,