The Abbey of Bardney, of which now nothing remains _in situ_ except a sepulchral barrow, dates from the Saxon Heptarchy, being one of the oldest in the kingdom. It was first built, says Dugdale {168a} by King Ethelred, who himself, in 705, quitted his throne of Mercia, and, retiring to Bardney, became its Abbot for the last 13 years of his life. The name of the actual founder, however, is lost in obscurity. Leland says {168b} that the monks themselves did not know it. The barrow referred to is called, to this day, the “coney-garth” or “King’s enclosure,” and Ethelred is supposed to have been buried there. The Abbey was destroyed in 870, by the Danes, under their leaders Inguar and Hubba, and 300 monks slaughtered before the altar. It was re-built 200 years later, and re-endowed, by Gilbert de Gaunt, the powerful Norman baron whose bounteous acts we have referred to more than once; and his son, Walter de Gaunt, in 1115, confirmed “to the church and monastery of St. Peter, St. Paul and St. Oswald, all those lands and possessions which his father had given in pure and perpetual alms to the same.” And all this was afterwards confirmed by Henry I. {169a} It was a very wealthy establishment of the Benedictine order. The superior was one of the twenty-five mitred Abbots in England; he was called the “Lord of Lindsey,” had a seat in the House of Lords, and a palace in London. At the time when the body of Oswald, King of Northumbria, was buried here, there were 300 monks in the Abbey, says Dugdale. I have mentioned that when the body of King Oswald was afterwards transferred to Gloucester, a hand was retained, which acquired miraculous powers; the versions as regards this vary, but there is a legend that Aidan, Bishop of Lindisfarne was dining with Oswald, there being a silver dish on the royal table, well replenished, when the king’s almoner announced “that there was a crowd of mendicants begging at the gate. The king immediately ordered the whole of the meat, and the dish itself, to be divided among them. This generosity so struck the bishop that he grasped the king’s right hand, exclaiming that “it was impossible that a hand so munificent should ever perish,” and the monks assert that it never did. After his death it was deposited as a holy relic in St. Peter’s Church at Bebba, now called Bamborough. Thence it was purloined by a monk of Peterborough (says William of Malmsbury) and deposited in the Abbey there, where it is said, by Nicholas Harpsfield, to have remained in a perfect state till after the Reformation. {169b}