A .D . 054.] EGBERT, KING OF KENT. 93 he had not seen about him on the past day ? To which the other replied, as Cain did, " I know not ; am I the keeper of the youths?" The king thereon said to him, "Thou base servant; didst thou not always speak evil to me of them ? Thou canst not, therefore, but know where they are." On which the wicked wretch, with the utmost effrontery, told the king what he had done. The latter was greatly enraged; but when his anger had passed off, he charged himself with the whole guilt of the crime, and being troubled beyond measure, he spent the remainder of the night in tears. When at length the day began to dawn on the earth, he commanded archbishop Deusdedit to be summoned, and as many of the nobles as possible, to whom he related in order how a column of light had been shed down from heaven upon the corpses of the holy youths. The archbishop gave counsel that the bodies of the innocents should be conveyed to the metropolitan church, and there be committed to burial after a royal manner. At the same time they went together to the spot, and found the sacred relics lying ignominiously beneath the king's chair. These things took place in the royal village of Eastreia [East Rye]. When the relics of the saints were duly placed on a bier, the archbishop gave orders that they should be carried to Christ's Church in Canterbury, but in vain ; for with all their efforts, they could not move them from the spot. They then changed their purpose, and attempted to convey them to the church of the blessed Augustine, but with no better success. They at length determined to carry them to the famous monastery of Warring, and on this change of purpose, they lifted the bier with the slightest effort, as if it were of no weight at all; and having arrived there, after the funeral rites were performed by the archbishop, they committed the bodies of the saints to burial near the larger altar; at which spot many signal miracles are wrought, by divine mercy, to God's praise and their glory. It happened at that time that Ermenburga, the king's sister, left her husband, the son of Penda, king of the Mercians, and with his consent chose to lead a life of chastity. On her coming to her brother, with her family, and signifying to him her resolution, he gave her the spot where he had seen the vision aforesaid; and there Ermenburga, the beloved of God, built a monastery in honour of the martyrs, and took seventy nuns as her associates, and at length rested in the