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All the able-bodied men of the community, to the number of thirty, departed, and having loaded a boat with the relies, sacred vases, and other valuables, took refuge in the neighbouring marshes. There remained in the choir only an abbot, a few infirm old men, two of whom were upwards of a hundred years old, and some children, whom their parents, according to the devotional custom of the period, were bring-up in the monastic habit. They continued to chant psalms at all the regular hours; when that of the mass arrived, the abbot placed himself at the altar in his sacerdotal robes. All present received the communion, and almost at the same moment the Danes entered the church. The chief who marched at their head killed with his own hand the abbot at the foot of the altar, and the soldiers seized the monks, young and old, whom terror had dispersed. ... As the prior fell dead, one of the children, ten years of age, who was greatly attached to him, fell on the body weeping, and asking to die with him. His voice and face struck one of the Danish chiefs; moved with pity, he drew the child out of the crowd, and taking off his frock, and throwing over him a Danish cassock, said, “Come with me, and quit not my side for a moment.” He thus saved him from the massacre, but no others were spared.—The Norman Conquest.