Roman Britain, we have said, was Christian for at least a hundred and fifty years; the country was also covered with monasteries and nunneries. Therefore it would be nothing out of the way or unusual to find monastic buildings on Thorney in the fourth century. There was as yet no Benedictine Rule. St. Martin of Tours introduced the Egyptian Rule into Gaul--whence it was taken over to England and to Ireland. It was a simple Rule, resembling that of the Essenes. No one had any property; all things were in common; the only art allowed to be practiced was that of writing; the older monks devoted their whole time to prayer; they took their meals together,--bread and herbs, with salt,--and, except for common prayer and common meals, they rarely left their cells: these were at first simple huts constructed of clay and bunches of reeds; their churches were of wood; they shaved their heads to the line of the ears; they wore leather jerkins, probably because these lasted longer than cloth of any kind; many of them wore hair shirts. The wooden church became a stone church; the huts became cells built about a cloister; the cells themselves were abolished, and a common dormitory was substituted. Then came the Saxons, and the monks were dispersed or fled into Wales, where they formed immense monasteries, as that of Bangor, with its three thousand monks. All had to be done over again, from the beginning. But monasticism, once introduced, flourished exceedingly among the Saxons, until the long war with the Danes destroyed the safety of the convent and demanded the service of every man able to carry a sword, and there were no more monks left in the land. All of which is necessary to explain why Dunstan had to people his Abbey with monks brought from Glastonbury. For Glastonbury and Abingdon, into which the Benedictine Rule had been introduced, were then the only monasteries surviving the long Danish troubles. These are the beginnings of the Abbey and the Church, and of life upon the Island of Bramble. This the foundation of the history that follows. A busy place before London Bridge was built; a place of throng and turmoil far back in the centuries before the coming of the Roman; a church built in the midst of the throng; monks in leather jerkins living beside the church; a ruined church lying in ruins for two hundred years, while the Saxon infidel daily passed beside it across the double ford; then a rebuilding--why not by Sebert? Another destruction, and another rebuilding.