“Thou sayeth it,” quoth my Lord Abbat; “but if we get not weapons and harness wherewith to withstand the invaders, we shall soon have no church left us to repair or beautify. By the holy face and incorruptible body of Saint Etheldreda, I will strip her very shrine of the gold plates which adorn it, and of the silver lamps which burn before it, and melt the gold and the silver, and barter the ingots for arms, rather than see the last refuge of my countrymen broken in upon, and the accursed Normans in my house of Ely!” “But doth not this savour of sacrilege?” said the sacrist. “Not so much as of patriotism and of real devotion to our saint and foundress. Saint Etheldreda, a true Saxon and East Anglian saint, will approve of the deed, if it should become necessary to strip her shrine. Her honour and sanctity depend not on lamps of silver and plates of gold, however rich and rare: the faithful flocked to her tomb, and said their orisons over it when it was but a plain stone block, with no shrine near it; and well I ween more miracles were wrought there, in the simple old times, than we see wrought now. Should the Normans get into our church, they will strip the shrine, an we do not; and they will rifle the tombs of Saint Sexburga, Saint Ermenilda, and Saint Withburga[104] and cast forth the bodies of our saints upon the dung-heap! Oh, sacrist! know ye not how these excommunicated foreigners are everywhere treating the saints of Saxon birth, and are everywhere setting up strange saints, whose names were never before heard by Englishmen, and cannot be pronounced by them! The reason of all this is clear: our Saxon hagiology is filled with the names of those that were patriots as well as saints, and we cannot honour them in one capacity without thinking of them in the other.” “This is most true,” said the chamberlain; “and the Normans be likewise setting up new shrines to the Blessed Virgin, and bringing in Notre Dames, and our Ladie of Walsingham, and other Ladies that were never heard of before; and they are enforcing pilgrimages in wholly new directions! If these things endure, alack and woe the while for our house of Ely, and for the monks of Saint Edmund’s-Bury, and for all Saxon houses! Our shrine boxes will be empty; we shall be neglected and forgotten in the land, even if the Normans do not dispossess us.” CHAPTER VI. IVO TAILLE-BOIS AND THE LADIE LUCIA.