A disgraceful dispute arose between the monks of Glastonbury and abbot Thurstan, unworthy of the name of abbot, a man of no tact, whom king William had preferred to the said place from the monastery of Caen. Among his other acts of stupidity he attempted to compel the monks to forsake the Gregorian chant, which he despised, and to learn and sing the chant of one William of Fécamp. When they took this ill, for they had now grown old in the use of this chant and in the rest of the ecclesiastical offices according to the practice of the church of Rome, suddenly with a band of armed men he rushed one day into the chapter-house, the monks suspecting nothing, pursued them as they fled in terror into the church as far as the altar, and there the armed men, piercing with darts and arrows the crosses and images and shrines of the saints, even slew one of the monks with a spear, as he clung to the holy altar, while another fell at the altar’s edge, pierced with arrows, and the rest, driven by necessity, defended themselves with benches and candlesticks, and though sorely wounded, drove the knights back beyond the choir; in the result two of the monks were killed and fourteen wounded, and some of the knights also were wounded. The matter was brought to judgment, and since the greatest blame rested on the abbot, the king removed him and sent him back to his monastery in Normandy. Many of the monks, however, were dispersed by the king’s command among bishoprics and abbeys, to be kept under guard. After the king’s death, the same abbot again purchased his abbey from the king’s son king William for 500_l._ of silver, and after wandering for some years among the possessions of the church, wretchedly ended his life far from the monastery itself, as he justly deserved. DOMESDAY BOOK (1085). =Source.=--Richard, son of Nigel, _Dialogus de Scaccario_, ed. Hughes, Crump, and Johnson, p. 107. The book of which you ask is the inseparable companion of the royal seal in the treasury. The cause of this practice, as I have been told by Henry, sometime bishop of Winchester, is as follows.