12. #Leofstan.# This Abbot was confessor to King Edward (the Confessor) and his Queen Edith. He acquired much land for the Abbey, and cleared away the woods between London and St. Albans, to make the roads safer for travellers. To secure the good services of a knight as protector of the Abbey he assigned him a certain manor; the service was faithfully performed. The Normans, when they came, dispossessed the holder, and conferred the manor upon Roger, a Norman knight, who, strange to say, fulfilled the conditions on which his predecessor had held the land. At Leofstan's death the Abbey was in a state of the greatest prosperity. 13. #Frithric.# This Abbot was chosen in the reign of Harold as leader of the southerners against the Normans, just as Aldred, Archbishop of York, was chosen as the leader of the northcountrymen. William accordingly ravaged the possessions of the monastery. After the Conquest, when William was accepted as King, Frithric administered to him the oath that he would keep inviolate all the laws of the realm, which former kings, especially Edward, had established. Needless to say, William soon began to disregard this oath, and despoiled the Abbey of St. Alban's more and more, till Frithric in despair resigned his office as Abbot and retired to Ely, where he soon died. The monks of Ely pretended that he took with him to their monastery the precious relics of St. Alban the Martyr. 14. #Paul of Caen# (1077-1093). A great change now comes over the history of the monastery. The new Abbot was a Norman and a kinsman of Lanfranc, the first Norman Archbishop of Canterbury. Like Lanfranc, who had been Abbot of Caen, he resolved to rebuild his church, and, like Lanfranc, adopted in England the style he had been accustomed to at Caen; but his ideas on the matter of size were far grander than that of his former Abbot, for St. Alban's Abbey Church far surpassed in its dimensions the cathedral church which the new archbishop built at Canterbury. As we have already seen (Chap. I.), he used the Roman bricks from the ruined city of Verulamium as building material. Important as this work was, the account of it occupies but a few lines in the Chronicles. In these it is mentioned that Lanfranc contributed 1,000 marks towards the cost. Paul was an energetic man, as may be seen by the short time occupied in building this large church; but it was not only in providing a new church that he was active, for it is recorded that he reformed the lives and manners of the monks, secured the restoration of land that had been alienated, founded cells as occasion demanded, and persuaded lay donors to give largely to the Abbey--tithes, bells, plate, and books. Robert Mowbray, Earl of Northumberland, gave the Priory of Tynemouth, which he had founded, to the Abbey of St. Albans. Abbot Paul died on his way home from a visit to this new priory, and was buried magnificently in his own Abbey.