Greater even than the transformation which has taken place in Stratford and the Hams is that which has converted Barking from a straggling fishing village, dependent on the famous Benedictine abbey, after which it is named, that was founded in the ninth century by St. Erkenwald, into a thriving market town, that is still rapidly widening its boundaries. The abbey itself, that was burnt by the Danes in 870, and rebuilt a century later by King Edgar, is gone, but for all that something of the old romance and sanctity still seems to cling to the district it dominated, that was for centuries looked upon by the faithful as one of the most sacred in {81} England. The first abbess was the saintly St. Ethelburga, sister of the founder, and she and St. Erkenwald were both buried in the abbey church. After the rebuilding of the abbey under Edgar, until the dissolution of the monasteries, its history was intimately bound up with that of the whole country, the holy women who successively held the office of abbess, many of them of royal birth, taking a very active share in politics, and unlike their successors in modern nunneries, exercising jurisdiction over men as well as women. Barking Abbey became celebrated throughout the length and breadth of the land for the miracles wrought in it, and also as a place of education for the daughters of aristocratic parents. The Abbess of Barking was one of the four ladies of England who were baronesses in their own right, a privilege that included, strange to say, the right to a seat in the Witenagemot, or Great Council, the predecessor of the Parliament the doors of which have ever been so jealously closed against women. The prosperity of the great abbey of Barking seems to have begun to decline about the middle of the fourteenth century through the flooding of some lands belonging to it, but it was still a very valuable property when it was confiscated by Henry VIII., who, with unusual generosity, gave to the then abbess an annuity of two hundred marks for the rest of her life. The only remaining relics of the once beautiful and extensive abbey buildings are a few bits of the old walls and a massive gateway--that from which, according to local tradition, William the Conqueror {82} set forth on his first royal progress through his newly acquired kingdom--which is known as 'The Five-bell Gate,' the curfew bell having been rung from the campanile above it, which used to bear the beautiful name of the Chapel of the Holy Rood, there having been a bas-relief of the Crucifixion on its walls.