Next, Edgar gave the monks a charter in which these lands are described and the boundaries laid down. You shall see what a goodly foundation--on paper--was this Abbey of St. Peter when it left the King’s hands. Take the map of London: run a line from Marble Arch along Oxford Street and Holborn--the line of the new Watling Street--till you reach the church of St. Andrew’s, Holborn; then follow the Fleet river to its mouth--you have the north and east boundaries. The Thames is a third boundary. For the fourth, draw a line from the spot where the Tyburn falls into the Thames, to Victoria Station; [Illustration: TO WESTMINSTER ABBEY. FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY.] thence to Buckingham Palace; thence north to Marble Arch. The whole of the land included belonged to the Abbey. A little later the Abbey acquired the greater part of Chelsea, the manor of Paddington, the manor of Kilburn, including Hampstead and Battersea,--in fact, what is now the wealthier half of modern London formerly belonged to the Benedictines of Westminster. At the time of Edgar’s charter, however, they had the area marked out above. More than half of it was marsh land. In Doomsday Book there are but twenty-five houses on the whole estate. Waste land lying in shallow ponds, sometimes flooded by high tides, only the rising ground between what is now St. James’s Park and Oxford Street could then be farmed. The ground was reclaimed and settled very slowly; still more slowly was it built upon. Almost within the memory of man snipe were shot over South Kensington; a hundred years ago the whole of that thickly populated district west and southwest of Mayfair was a land of open fields. So that, notwithstanding the great extent of their possessions, the monks were by no means rich, nor were Edgar’s buildings, one imagines, very stately. Yet the later buildings replaced the older on the same sites. A plan of the Abbey of Edgar and Dunstan would show the Chapter-house and the Church where they are now; the common dormitory over the common hall, as it was afterward; the refectory where it was afterward; the cloisters, without which no Benedictine monastery was complete, also where are those of Henry III. But the buildings were insignificant compared with what followed.