CHAPTER XXVII.
Bangor--Edmund Price--The Bridges--Bookselling--Future Pope--Wild Irish--Southey.
Bangor is seated on the spurs of certain high hills near the Menai, a strait separating Mona or Anglesey from Caernarvonshire.

It was once a place of Druidical worship, of which fact, even without the testimony of history and tradition, the name which signifies "upper circle" would be sufficient evidence.

On the decay of Druidism a town sprang up on the site and in the neighbourhood of the "upper circle," in which in the sixth century a convent or university was founded by Deiniol, who eventually became Bishop of Bangor.

This Deiniol was the son of Deiniol Vawr, a zealous Christian prince who founded the convent of Bangor Is Coed, or Bangor beneath the wood in Flintshire, which was destroyed, and its inmates almost to a man put to the sword by Ethelbert, a Saxon king, and his barbarian followers at the instigation of the monk Austin, who hated the brethren because they refused to acknowledge the authority of the Pope, whose delegate he was in Britain.

There were in all three Bangors; the one at Is Coed, another in Powis, and this Caernarvonshire Bangor, which was generally termed Bangor Vawr or Bangor the great.