When the old Palace of Westminster was founded, another wall was erected round its buildings. Then the island was completely surrounded by a fortification; the fisher-folk removed northward and settled somewhere lower down the river, where afterward arose the New Palace and Whitehall; not higher up, where the ground continued to be a marsh for many centuries to come. We have seen the beginnings of the Church and of the Abbey. What were the beginnings of the Palace? When did a king begin to live on Thorney Island? And why? Since neither tradition nor history speaks to the contrary, we may suppose that Cnut was the first to build some kind of palace or residence in this place. His buildings are said to have been burned in the time of Edward; therefore he must have built something. His residence on Thorney was neither continuous nor at any time of long duration. The court of the kings for many generations to come was a Court Itinerant. King Cnut traveled perpetually from place to place, followed by his regiment of house carles, though one knows not how many accompanied him. He stayed at Thorney because he loved the conversation of the Abbot Wolfstan. It was at Thorney that, according to the familiar story, he rebuked the courtiers in the matter of the rising tide; and it was in the concluding years of his reign, when that marvelous change, graphically described by Freeman, fell upon him, and he became exactly the opposite of what he had before shown himself; when he founded and endowed and augmented churches and monasteries. His heart was changed: the stately services of the minster, the rolling of the organ, the chanting of the monks, the splendor of the altar, the story of the Gospel, the legends and the acts of the Saints, the pilgrimage to Rome,--these things pleased him more than the clash of steel on shield, the war cry, and the glorious madness of the fight. The beginner of the old Palace was the great King Cnut the Dane.