MONASTIC FOUNDATIONS.—_The Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul_, which stood on the eastern banks of the Severn, in the suburb which still bears its name, owes its foundation to Roger de Montgomery, the first Norman Earl of Shrewsbury. In the time of the Saxons it is said a church stood on or near this spot, and a community of monks was in all probability united to it. The Danes, during their ravages in the ninth century, plundered and depopulated monastic institutions, and this it is conjectured fell with the rest. The kingdom becoming more settled under the reign of Edgar, many of the abbey churches which had till then laid desolate were taken possession of by secular priests, who, swerving from the strictness of monastic life, engaged in the active concerns of society. Such, apparently, was the state of the monastery of Shrewsbury at the time of the Norman invasion. The church, then a rude edifice of wood, was governed by Odelirius, a priest, who as archpresbyter, presided over a college of married secular clergy. Its district was called the parish of the city. From the fact that the portion of each prebend, at the death of the incumbent, should revert to the monks of a new abbey, there can be no doubt that at this period it was collegiate. This was the cause of much litigation, it being customary for ecclesiastical livings to descend as by inheritance to the next of blood. These claims were, however, abolished during the reign of Henry I. In the seminary belonging to this ancient church, a priest named Seward is mentioned as an eminent teacher, and to him the historian Ordericus Vitalis owed his education. When Roger de Montgomery took possession of his territories in Shropshire, he determined to refound the monastery, and to introduce into it the monks of his favourite order, St. Benedict, whom he invited over from a religious house founded on the estates of Mabel, his first Countess, at Sees, in Normandy. He obtained the land on which the monastery of Shrewsbury stood from Siward, a Saxon nobleman, and in 1083 laid the foundation of a magnificent abbey, which, when finished, was re-dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul, the patrons of the ancient monastery. With the consent of his Countess, Adelaisa, he retired to the holy solitude of his monastery and received the tonsure and habit of a monk, on which occasion he presented the fraternity with the tunic of Hugh, the sainted abbot of Clugin, in Burgundy, which vestment he occasionally wore, doubtless in anxious hope of its communicating some portion of the sanctity of its former possessor. In the immediate prospect of his dissolution he invested himself with this precious relic, thus exemplifying the pitiable superstition of those who “put on the weeds of Dominic or Franciscan and think to pass disguised.” He was buried in the Lady Chapel, between the two altars.