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Dorchester became successively the seat of two great bishoprics the one West Saxon, the other Mercian. The first, founded by Birinus, when Wessex extended far north of the Thames, was divided seventy years later into two sees Winchester and Sherburne.
He had been silent throughout the walk, seeming to listen in turn to Brother Dunstan's rhapsodies about the forthcoming arrival of Brother George and Brother Birinus with all that it meant to him of responsibility more than he could bear removed from his shoulders; or to Brother Raymond's doubts if it should not be made a rule that when no priest was in the Abbey the brethren ought to walk over to Wivelrod, the church Sir Charles attended four miles away, or to Brother Jerome's disclaimer of Roman sympathies in voicing his opinion that the Office should be said in Latin.
The immediate objective of the new community was Malta, where it was proposed to open their first house and where, in despite of the outraged dignity of innumerable real monks already there, they made a successful beginning. A second house was opened at Gibraltar and put in charge of Brother Birinus.
By the way, I'm going to have Brother Nicholas to work out here awhile, and I want you to act as guest-master. Brother Raymond will be porter, and I'm going to send Brother Birinus off the farm to be sacristan. I shall miss him out here, of course." The Prior put his hand once more to the plough, and Mark went slowly back to the Abbey.
A royal city was this when Birinus, the apostle of Wessex, came hither in 634, on his way to the Oxfordshire Dorchester, to baptize the King of the West Saxons; and in 679 the episcopal see was established, a cathedral built, and a monastic house attached to it.
"It's only the wind," he murmured, with that half of his mind which was awake. "March is going out like a dragon." After Mass next day, when Mark was giving the chaplain his breakfast, the latter asked who kept the key of the tabernacle. "Brother Birinus, I expect. He is the sacristan." "It ought to have been given to me before Mass. Please go and ask for it," requested the chaplain.
The two great shrines of the Saxon church were, however, those of St Birinus, the Apostle of Wessex, and of St Swithin, Bishop of Winchester in the ninth century, the day of whose translation, July 15th, was, till the Reformation, a universal festival throughout England. In his honour the Saxon church, till then known as the church of SS. Peter and Paul, was rededicated in 964.
In that year St Birinus converted the West Saxons and their King Kynegils to Christianity. Though Kynegils seems immediately to have begun to build a church in Winchester in which he established monks and endowed it with the whole of the land for a space of seven miles round the city, Winchester did not become an episcopal See until the year 662.
Birinus had fixed the centre of his missionary labours at Dorchester, only six miles distant, but the Abbey was the fruit of the heroic zeal of another evangelist, upon whom his mantle fell St. Wilfrid.
Birinus, Anselm, Giles, Chad, Athanasius if properly suppressed, Mark, these in varying degrees, have something in them, but look at the others! Dominic, ambitious and sly, Jerome, a pompous prig, Dunstan, a nincompoop, Raymond, a milliner, Nicholas, a well, you know what I think Nicholas is, Augustine, another nincompoop, Lawrence, still at Sunday School, and poor Simon, a clown.
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