Mary, ever a virgin," who enriched monasteries without
number,--Leominster, Wenlock, Chester, St. Mary's Stow by Lincoln,
Worcester, Evesham; and who, above all, founded the great monastery in
that town of Coventry, which has made her name immortal for another and a
far nobler deed; and enriched it so much "that no monastery in England
possessed such abundance of gold, silver, jewels, and precious stones,"
beside that most precious jewel of all, the arm of St. Augustine, which
not Lady Godiva, but her friend, Archbishop Ethelnoth, presented to
Coventry, "having bought it at Pavia for a hundred talents of silver and a
talent of gold." [Footnote: William of Malmesbury.]
Less known, save to students, is her husband, Leofric the great Earl of
Mercia and Chester, whose bones lie by those of Godiva in that same
minster of Coventry; how "his counsel was as if one had opened the Divine
oracles"; very "wise," says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, "for God and for
the world, which was a blessing to all this nation"; the greatest man,
save his still greater rival, Earl Godwin, in Edward the Confessor's
court.
Less known, again, are the children of that illustrious pair: Algar, or
Alfgar, Earl of Mercia after his father, who died, after a short and
stormy life, leaving two sons, Edwin and Morcar, the fair and hapless
young earls, always spoken of together, as if they had been twins; a
daughter, Aldytha, or Elfgiva, married first (according to some) to
Griffin, King of North Wales, and certainly afterwards to Harold, King of
England; and another, Lucia (as the Normans at least called her), whose
fate was, if possible, more sad than that of her brothers.
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