The impressiveness of the twin towers of the west end of the great church is due in part to the extreme simplicity of the Norman work--for the buildings were completed just before the Norman Conquest--and also to their great height of 328 feet. On entering it is hard to believe that until 1790 the abbey and its great church were in a perfect state of preservation, for the roofs have gone except in the aisles, where the stones of the vault have been in some places so disturbed by roots and frosts that collapses are imminent. There are traces of orange-coloured painting on the arches, and the stone is of a warm cream, which looks singularly beautiful when afternoon shadows are falling from arches and pillars. There are only the foundations of the semicircular apse, with its nine chapels, and the gaps in the east end of the church are beautified by the presence of tall larches that droop their graceful branches over the broken moss-grown walls. The fourteenth-century chapel on the south side, dedicated to St. Pierre, is also in a state of ruin. St. Philibert founded Jumièges in 654, about the same time as St. Wandrille was begun, and it also suffered terribly at the hands of the Northmen, who tortured and massacred without mercy, and left the once prosperous abbey a shattered ruin. The rebuilding was encouraged by William Longsword, the son of Rollo; but the builder of the Norman church which stands to-day was Abbot Robert of Jumièges, who was afterwards appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Edward the Confessor, who had been educated at Jumièges under his care. The buildings, completed and consecrated in 1067, remained in use until 1793, the date of the Suppression, so that, with an interval of about a century in its early history, Jumièges existed as a monastery for 1,139 years, and in that period was ruled by eighty-two abbots. It is interesting to know that, although the Benedictines of Jumièges contributed a very large sum towards the ransom of Richard I. after his capture on the way home from the Holy Land, the monastery was twice plundered by English armies, and the first occasion was in Edward III.’s reign, when the generosity of the monks seems to have been quite forgotten! A portion of the buildings belonging to William Longsword’s church is to be seen in the Chapel of St. Pierre already mentioned. An interesting legend of the founder of the abbey explains the presence of a wolf at the feet of the saint on a carved stone boss. St. Philibert had given to a convent four leagues from Jumièges the laundry work of his abbey, and the Abbess and her nuns washed the linen which was sent to them. One day a wolf ate the ass that carried the washing, but the holy Abbess induced the wicked wolf to carry the baskets, which he did, we read, until the end of his life. The greatness and power of the abbey declined very much after the Reformation, and at the time of the Revolution the religious who were dispersed were not numerous.