This has been a place of Christian worship continuously for over 1300 years, since Osric, an Anglo-Saxon prince, founded a religious house here in 678-9 AD. At the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, the monastery was not thriving and in 1072 King William I appointed Serlo, a monk from Mont St Michel in Normandy to be its Abbot. An energetic, charismatic and devout man, Serlo built up the wealth of the monastery to the point where in 1089 he was able to start building the magnificent abbey church which so