Note 891 — Chapter VI · THE DANISH KINGS IN ENGLAND.[818] 1017–1042.

The Canterbury Chronicle is fuller than the others on this head, calling the building “an mynster of stane and lime.” This is one of the passages which have been strangely applied to prove that stone architecture was hardly known in England before the Norman Conquest. Any one who knows the buildings of Essex, as compared with those of Somerset or Northamptonshire, will at once see that the notice of a stone building as something singular must be purely local. The present church of Ashington contains no detail earlier than the last years of the twelfth century; but I suspect that the walls are mainly those of Cnut’s minster.