Then in rapid succession Grimbald, Alfred’s first nominated abbot, and Alswitha, his devoted queen and widow, were called to rest, and the queen’s remains were piously interred side by side with those of her husband. Thus within three years of Alfred’s death the Newan Mynstre had risen not merely into being, but had already become invested with ascendancy and popular prestige as the hallowed repository of the mortal remains of a wonder-working saint, a venerated abbot, of a saintly king, and of his royal consort. Some twenty years later, within the same abbey church--thus already established as a venerated mausoleum--Edward the Elder himself was also laid, after a strenuous reign, in which he had consolidated the Anglo-Saxon power and had re-established firmly the unity of the kingdom. Thus, as year succeeded year, Winchester grew in extent and importance. The prestige and dignity of its ecclesiastical foundations established it thus early as the leading centre of pious pilgrimage in the south of England, and shopmen and merchants followed eagerly the pilgrim stream. Accordingly Edward the Elder drew up what may be called the first commercial code of the city--laws regulating the selling of goods and the making of bargains in open market in the city. In the same reign associations or confraternities of traders for mutual support began to be formed--confraternities which, under the name of ‘gilds’ or guilds, were destined to become in time corporate municipal bodies, with the ‘Hall of the Gild Merchant’ as the centre of civic rule and influence. A formal mayor and corporation were to come later, but the elements and something more of civic rule in Winchester can be thus traced continuously back and recognized for full a thousand years. Of Athelstan the warrior we have but little actual Winchester history to record; he reigned from 925 to 940, and was buried not at Winchester but at Malmesbury. To atone for this historical paucity we have one glorious romantic legend--the legend of the fight between Guy of Warwick and Colbrand, the Danish giant and warrior, a story which has long been a classic fairy tale. Rudborne, in his _Major Historia Wintoniae_, copying from the _Liber de Hyda_, solemnly records how Athelstan, invested in his capital city by Anelafe, King of the Danes, agreed with his besieger to decide the issue by a combat between champions, and he tells us how a new Polyphemus, monstrum, horrendum, informe, ingens, Colbrand, “a giant wondrous of stature, hideous of aspect, and of unparalleled ferocity,” came forward to champion the Danish cause, and how the English protagonist, Guy of Warwick, his opposite in every attribute, “prudent, self-restrained, resolute, manly in mind and skilled to combat,” Against great odds bare up the war