does the M. precede the Virg.; the usual manner of describing these saints being SS. M. XI. Virg., till the number rose at a leap to eleven thousand.
As yet we have had no circumstances relating to these ladies, but with the tenth century they begin to appear. Sigebert of Gemblours (d. 1112) is the first author to narrate them. Under the date 453, he reports the glorious victory of the Virgin Ursula. She was the only daughter of Nothus, an illustrious and wealthy British prince, and was sought in marriage by the son of a “certain most ferocious tyrant.” Ursula had, however, dedicated herself to celibacy, and her father was in great fear of offending God by consenting to the union, and of exasperating the king by refusing it. However, the damsel solved the difficulty: by Divine inspiration, she persuaded her father to agree to the proposal of the tyrant, but only subject to the condition that her father and the king should choose ten virgins of beauty and proper age, and should give them to her, and that she and they should each have a thousand damsels under them, and that on eleven triremes they should be suffered to cruize about for three years in the sanctity of unsullied virginity. Ursula made this condition in the hopes that the difficulty of fulfilling it would prove insurmountable, or that she
