be it understood, which dates circa A.D. 1539-40. Leland, writing of Osric, somewhile king of Northumbria, the founder of the famous Abbey of Gloucester, tells us how this King Osric "first laye in St. Petronell's Chappel," of the Gloucester Abbey. Osric died in the year of grace 729.
Thus before her body, at the instance of the Frankish King Pepin, was translated into the little imperial mausoleum hard by the great Basilica of S. Peter from her tomb on the Via Ardeatina, there was a Mercian chapel named after this Petronilla in the heart of the distant and only very imperfectly christianized Angle-land (England).
In the "Historia Monasterii S. Petri Gloucestriæ," a document, or rather a collection of documents, of great value, we find an entry which tells us how Kyneburg, the sister of King Osric, and first abbess of the religious house of Gloucester, ruled the house for twenty-nine years, and, dying in A.D. 710, was buried before the altar of S. Petronilla; and later an entry in the same Historia relates that Queen Eadburg, widow of Wulphere, king of the Mercians, abbess of Gloucester from A.D. 710 to A.D. 735, was buried by the side of Kyneburg before S. Petronilla s altar. King Osric himself, who died in A.D. 729, was buried in the same grave as his sister Kyneburg, or as it is expressed in the "Historia," "in ecclesia Sancti Petri coram altari sanctæ Petronillæ, in Aquilonari parte ejusdem monasterii."
Professor Freeman quaintly comments here as follows: "It is certain that there was a church of some kind, a predecessor, however humble, of the great Cathedral Church (of Gloucester) that now is, at least from the days of Osric (circa A.D. 729). But more than this we cannot say, except that it contained an altar of S. Petronilla."
APPENDIX II.—ON S. PETER'S TOMB
S. Peter's Tomb.—While Pope Paul V's task of destroying
and rebuilding the eastern end of old S. Peter's (the work
