Evagrius tells us that the church which enshrined the pillar on which S. Simeon Stylites practised his austerities was "constructed in the form of a cross, adorned with colonnades on the four sides." S. Edward the Confessor is reputed to have been the first to introduce cruciform churches into England, in the erection of his famous abbey at Westminster. The same historian just named, Evagrius, who wrote in the sixth century, records that Chosroes, who, though a heathen, had a Christian wife, gave to Gregory, Patriarch of Antioch, among other things, "a cross to be fixed upon the holy table;" and Sozomen, earlier still, refers to "crosses lying upon the altar." The primitive ages, however, knew nothing, unless in an exceptional case, of any permanent ornaments upon their altars, yet a cross seems to have been sometimes hung above, or placed beside them, in very early days. In this, as in other matters already dealt with, the suggestion rather than the representation of the Saviour's sacrifice probably came first in the development of Christian art. Thus S. Paulinus of Nola, writing about the year 400, describes a cross in front of an altar erected by S. Felix; it had beside it the Alpha and Omega, around it a crown or nimbus, and a white lamb was placed beneath. The cross did not become an indispensible ornament of the altar until the tenth century, and down to the fourteenth century it was invariably brought in, with the two candles, by acolytes immediately before mass, and removed at its conclusion. The Venerable Bede gives one of the earliest, if not absolutely the first, mention of an altar cross in England, when he relates how Paulinus, when forced in 633 to retire from Northumbria into Kent, took with him "a large gold cross and a golden chalice dedicated to the use of the altar." S. Cuthbert a little later erected one in his oratory at Lindisfarne, and Aldhelm, Bishop of Sherborne, who died in 709, speaks in one of his verses of "a cross at the altar gleaming with plates of gold and silver, and decked with gems." Coming to later times, it is on record that Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester from 1006 to 1014, gave a splendid gold cross to the altar of S. Etheldreda in the cathedral, and that S. Margaret of Scotland presented to a church a crucifix, on which was a figure of pure gold.