There is hardly an old garden near that has not some carved stones of curious shape recognisable by the antiquary as having once formed part of a shaft, a window, or an archway of the proud Abbey.

Of these scattered fragments the most important is the lectern of alabaster, Romanesque in style, now, after long misuse and neglect serving its original purpose in the church of Saint Egwin at Norton, a village lying nearly three miles to the north of the town.

A description of this relic will be found in the last section of this work.
The local tradition of the splendour of the Monastery is no doubt handed down to us by Thomas Habington, the antiquary, who visited the town in 1640.

"There was not to be found," he writes, with pardonable exaggeration, "out of Oxford or Cambridge, so great an assemblage of religious buildings in the kingdom"!.