But the most important of Offa’s foundations was that of St. Alban’s abbey. I have followed the date of Ingram’s Saxon Chronicle, Speed, and others, in assigning 794 as the period of his death, and therefore cannot suppose the foundation of St. Alban’s to have been later than that year, though it may have been the year previous. (V. _Storr’s Chron._) From _Tanner’s Not. Mon. (I. Hertfordshire, I.)_ we learn that A. D. 793 a noble abbey for one hundred Benedictine monks was founded by Offa. The Chronicler Speed says that in A. D. 795 “Offa in honour of St. Albane, and in repentance of his sins, built a magnificke monastery (over against Verolamium in the place then called Holmehurst, where that protomartyr of Britaine for the constant profession of the Faith lost his head), indowing it with lands and rich revenewes for the maintenance of an hundred monks. Upon the first gate of entrance in stone standeth cut a salteir argent in a field azure, and is assigned by the judicious in Heraldry to bee the armes that he bare.”--_Book 7. ch. 28._ Matthew of Westminster and others assign different dates varying from A. D. 793 to 797 to this foundation, and the Monk of St. Albans agrees with Matth. West. in recording the vision of an angel which occurred to Offa at Bath, wherein he was instructed by the heavenly visitant to exhume and place in a tomb worthy of him the body of St. Alban. This design he subsequently named to the Pope, for which the Holy Pontiff commended him, and promised to take the projected abbey of St. Alban under his especial protection “nullo episcopo sive archiepiscopo mediante.” Speed further states, that Offa built a church in Warwickshire after his return from Rome, “where the adjoining town from it and him beareth the name of _Off-Church_:” and that at Bath he built “_another_ monastery.” Perhaps it is to this last, and not to St. Peter’s church which was rebuilt by him (see _ante_), to which Dugdale refers in his _Mon. Angl._ when he says, “Monasterium Batoniense rex Offa construxit, quod post rex Edgarus, sicut alia monasteria reparavit.” To the above Holinshed adds the church of Hereford, which he states that he “indowed with great revenues.” _Hist. Engl. b. 6. ch. 4._]