There was no cloister-monk of Ely that better knew the legends of the house than Elfric, for his father, Goodman Hugh, who had dwelt by saint Ovin’s cross, and his father’s father who had dwelt in the same place, had been great fenners and fowlers and gossips, and had hawked with the best of the abbats and monks, and had stored their memories with the history of the abbey and the saints of Ely, and had amused and sanctified the long winter-nights, when the fire of wood mixed with peat burned brightly on their hearth, by relating to little Elfric all the legends that they knew. Now there was one of these which had made a profound impression upon Elfric’s mind, which, by nature, loved adventure and ingenious stratagem. It was a short tale, and simple withal, and easy to tell. Saint Withburga, the fourth in order of the four great female saints that were and are the ornaments and shining lights of the great house, did not live and die as her sister Saint Etheldreda had done, at Ely, and as Lady Abbess. In her infancy she was sent to nurse at a village called Holkham, belonging to the king her father, Anna, king of the East Angles. In this place she lived many years, whence the village of Holkham was sometimes called Withburgstowe, and a church was built there in memory of her. On the death of the king her father, which befel in the year of grace six hundred and fifty-four, Withburga removed from Holkham to Dereham, another village in the country of East Anglia; and here, affecting a retired and religious life, she founded a monastery of nuns, over which she presided for many years. Peaceful and holy was her life, and blessed was her end. When she died, they buried her there, in the churchyard at Dereham.[221] And lo! after many more years had passed, and the other tenants of this churchyard and even those that had been buried long after had mouldered into dust, the grave of Withburga being opened, her body was found entire and without the slightest sign of corruption! Aye, there she lay in her shroud and coffin, with her hands crossed upon her breast, and with her little crucifix of silver lying upon her breast, even as she had lain on the bier on the day of her death so many, many years before. The saintly incorruptible body was forthwith removed into the church, where it was preserved with great care and devotion by the good people of Dereham, and it continued there, not without manifold miracles, until the time of that pious monarch King Edgar,[222] who restored the monastery at Ely, which the Danes had burned, and gave the house that precious charter which hath been named before as not being given privately and in a corner, but in the most public manner and under the canopy of Heaven. Now, in restoring the abbey of Ely to its pristine splendour, and in augmenting the number of the brotherhood, it behoved the king to increase the lands and domains of the house; and, conformably, the