The Austin canons, as they were commonly called, made their way across the Channel at the beginning of Henry’s reign. The circumstances of their earliest settlement illustrate the intimate connexion between the religious and the national revival in England. Their first priory was founded in 1108 by the English queen Matilda--“Maude the good queen,” as they gratefully called her--in the soke of Aldgate, just within the eastern wall of London. Part of its endowment was furnished by the estates of an old English cnihtengild whose members surrendered their property for the benefit of the new community. The house was dedicated to the Holy Trinity; its first prior, Norman by name, was a native of Kent who had studied in Gaul under S. Anselm; through Anselm he was enabled to bring the Augustinian order under the notice of Matilda, whose confessor he afterwards became. How he lavished all his funds on the furnishing of his church and the stocking of his library; how the starving brotherhood set out a row of empty plates in the refectory to attract the sympathy of the citizens who were taking their Sunday stroll round the suburb and peeping curiously in at the windows of the new building; how the pitying burgher-wives vowed each to bring a loaf every Sunday; and how the plates in the refectory were never empty again[184]--is a story which need not be repeated in detail. Some fifteen years later Rahere the king’s minstrel threw up his post at court to become the head of an Austin priory which he built on a plot of waste marshy ground along the eastern border of Smithfield. He dedicated his establishment to S. Bartholomew and attached to it an hospital for the relief of the sick and needy. Every day--so tradition told--Alfhun, the master of the hospital, went about the city as the Little Sisters of the Poor do to this day, begging in the shops and markets for help towards the support of the sick folk under his care. Most likely he was himself a London citizen; his name is enough to prove him of genuine English birth.[185] Another famous Augustinian house was that of Merton in Surrey. There the brotherhood devoted themselves to educational work. Their most illustrious scholar--born in the very year in which their house was founded, 1117--is known to us already as Thomas the son of Gilbert Becket. At the other end of England, Walter Lespec, the noblest character among the lay barons of the time, found comfort for the loss of an only son in “making Christ his heir”--devoting to God’s service the heritage which had been destined for his boy, and founding the priory of Kirkham in Yorkshire on the spot where the lad had expired.[186] Before the close of Henry’s reign the Austin canons had acquired such importance that two of their order were raised to the episcopate, one even to the primacy of all Britain. After five years of vacancy the metropolitan chair of Canterbury was still too vividly haunted by memories of S. Anselm for