Now if we wish to trace back to its first commencement that "little monasterie without the walles of London," we must frankly admit that concerning its earliest history any information we possess is of a very shadowy character. Certain it is that for some centuries a religious building had existed on Thorn-ea, one of those many little islands standing above the reach of the floods which rose at high tide in that part of the Thames where it broadened out into a great marsh. Possibly the Romans had a station at Thorn-ea, as Roman bricks and pieces of mosaic and such remains as a fine Roman coffin have been discovered from time to time, and Bede, our first English historian, states that Lucius, king of Britain, himself a Christian, built a church on Thorney Island about the year A.D. 178. For nearly four hundred years England had remained the conquered province of the Roman Empire. Then the greatness of that power began to wane; Rome was threatened at her own doors by the Goths, and to defend herself she had to call back her legions from Britain and leave the island to its fate. Picts, Scots, and Saxons bore down on it, and the Saxons, "fierce beyond other foes, cunning as they are fierce, the sea-wolves that live on the pillage of the world, to whom the sea is their school of war and the storm their friend," swept all before them. Wherever they went on their victorious way they slaughtered and shattered, and whatever Christian church existed on Thornea they razed to the ground. For awhile the curtain falls, then it rises to show us Sebert, a Christian king of the East Saxons, who lived at the beginning of the seventh century. He was converted and baptized by Mellitus, the Bishop of London, and founded the Minster of St. Paul on the east side of London. But in years to come, when Thornea was no longer a desolate "Isle of Thorns overrun and wild," but the spot above which there towered the Abbey, the Palace and the Monastery all grouped together under the name of the West Minster Foundation, the monks declared that King Sebert had raised a second church in this very place, dedicated to St. Peter, the Prince of the Apostles. Furthermore they told how one dark and stormy Sunday night, the eve of the day set apart by Bishop Mellitus for the consecration of the new church, Edric, a fisherman busy at his craft, heard a voice calling him from the opposite side of the river. He went across in his boat, and found there a stranger, who begged to be rowed over to the island. This Edric did with some difficulty, as the waters were rough, and raised with "prodigious rains," and the stranger, landed safely on the island, at once went towards the newly builded church. "Watch well this night, Edric," he said as he left the astonished fisherman. So Edric waited and watched, and in the space of a few moments he saw the empty church ablaze with light, standing out without darkness or shadow in the wild night.