Thirty-four years have passed since the battle of Hastings; and our tale has now advanced to the autumn of the last year of the eleventh century. The face of the country is little altered since we last beheld it, so far as the works of God are concerned: the woods, His first temples, and the everlasting hills stand, as when Elfric and his brother hunted therein with Prince Edwy, or the sainted Bertric suffered martyrdom in the recesses of the forest, at the hands of the ruthless Danes {xxix}. But the works of man are more transitory, and in them there is a great change. The Norman castle rebuilt by Etienne stands where erst stood the Anglo-Saxon hall; the new Priory of St. Wilfred's resembles that of St. Denys in architecture, although it bears the name of the old English saint, to whose honour the first sacred pile, erected by Offa of Aescendune was dedicated; the houses which dot the scene are of a more substantial character; stone is superseding wood. Whatever were its darker features, the Norman conquest brought with it a more advanced civilisation, especially as expressed in architecture {xxx}. Within her bower, as the retiring apartments of the lady of the castle were termed, sat Edith of Aescendune, not the first who had borne that name. She had now passed middle age, and her years would soon number half a century, yet time had dealt very kindly with her, and but few shades of grey appeared amidst her locks. The traces of a gentle grief were upon her, but men said she mourned for the absence of her lord and her eldest son, and her thoughts seemed far away from the embroidery at which she worked with her maidens--an altar frontal for the priory church. She thought of the far East--of the sandy wastes of Syria. Or her fancy painted the holy city, with her dear ones as worshippers in its reconquered shrines. For she had not found an unkind lord in Etienne. The scenes which he had passed through, as related in the earlier pages of this Chronicle, had produced fruit for good, which Lanfranc (under whose spiritual guidance he placed himself) had zealously tended and fostered. He dared not think of his father, of whose guilt he could not but be unwillingly convinced; nor was it true in his case: "He who's convinced against his will Is but an unbeliever still." But there was one act of mercy of which he had been the object, which above all influenced and changed his heart towards the English. And that was the Christian charity he had received from the aged Englishwoman, the nurse of Wilfred, whose son Eadwin he had so cruelly slain in the Dismal Swamp.