ABBEVILLE, a town of northern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Somme, on the Somme, 12 m. from its mouth in the English Channel, and 28 m. N,W. of Amiens on the Northern railway. Pop. (1901) 18,519; (1906) 18,971. It lies in a pleasant and fertile valley, and is built partly on an island and partly on both sides of the river, which is canalized from this point to the estuary. The streets are narrow, and the houses are mostly picturesque old structures, built of wood, with many quaint gables and dark archways. The most remarkable building is the church of St Vulfran, erected in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. The original design was not completed. The nave has only two bays and the choir is insignificant. The facade is a magnificent specimen of the flamboyant Gothic style, flanked by two Gothic towers. Abbeville has several other old churches and an hotel-de-ville, with a belfry of the 13th century. Among the numerous old houses, that known as the Maison de Francois Ie, which is the most remarkable, dates from the 16th century. There is a statue of Admiral Courbet (d. 1885) in the chief square. The public institutions include tribunals of first instance and of commerce, a board of trade-arbitrators, and a communal college. Abbeville is an important industrial centre; in addition to its old-established manufacture of cloth, hemp-spinning, sugar-making, ship-building and locksmiths' work are carried on; there is active commerce in grain, but the port has little trade.

Abbeville, the chief town of the district of Ponthieu, first appears in history during the 9th century. At that time belonging to the abbey of St Riquier, it was afterwards governed by the counts of Ponthieu. Together with that county, it came into the possession of the Alencon and other French families, and afterwards into that of the house of Castillo, from whom by marriage it fell in 1272 to Edward I., king of England. French and English were its masters by turns till 1435 when, by the treaty of Arras, it was ceded to the duke of Burgundy. In 1477 it was annexed by Louis XI., king of France, and was held by two illegitimate branches of the royal family in the 16th and 17th centuries, being in 1696 reunited to the crown.

ABBEY, EDWIN AUSTIN (1852- ), American painter, was born at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 1st of April 1852. He left the schools of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts at the age of nineteen to enter the art department of the publishing house of Harper & Brothers in New York, where, in company with such men as Howard Pyle, Charles Stanley Reinhart, Joseph Pennell and Alfred Parsons, he became very successful as an illustrator. In 1878 he was sent by the Harpers to England to gather material for illustrations of the poems of Robert Herrick. These, published in 1882, attracted much attention, and were followed by illustrations for Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer (1887), for a volume of Old Songs (1889), and for the comedies (and a few of the tragedies) of Shakespeare. His water-colours and pastels were no less successful than the earlier illustrations in pen and ink. Abbey now became closely identified with the art life of England, and was elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours in 1883. Among his water-colours are ``The Evil Eye'' (1877); ``The Rose in October'' (1879); ``An Old Song'' (1886); ``The Visitors'' (1890), and ``The Jongleur'' (1892). Possibly his best known pastels are ``Beatrice,'' ``Phyllis,'' and ``Two Noble Kinsmen.'' In 1890 he made his first appearance with an oil painting, ``A May Day Morn,'' at the Royal Academy in London. He exhibited ``Richard duke of Gloucester and the Lady Anne'' at the Royal Academy in 1896, and in that year was elected A.R.A., becoming a full R.A. in 1898. Apart from his other paintings, special mention must be made of the large frescoes entitled ``The Quest of the Holy Grail,'' in the Boston Public Library, on which he was occupied for some years; and in 1901 he was commissioned by King Edward VII. to paint a picture of the coronation, containing many portraits elaborately grouped. The dramatic subjects, and the brilliant colouring of his on pictures, gave them pronounced individuality among the works of contemporary painters. Abbey became a member not only of the Royal Academy, but also of the National Academy of Design of New York, and honorary member of the Royal Bavarian Society, the Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts (Paris), the American Water-Colour Society, etc. He received first class gold medals at the International Art Exhibition of Vienna in 1898, at Philadelphia in 1898, at the Paris Exhibitions of 1889 and 1900, and at Berlin in 1903; and was made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honour.

ABBEY (Lat. abbatia; from Syr. abba, father), a monastery, or conventual establishment, under the government of an ABBOT or an ABBESS. A priory only differed from an abbey in that the superior bore the name of prior instead of abbot. This was the case in all the English conventual cathedrals, e.g. Canterbury, Ely, Norwich, &c., where the archbishop or bishop occupied the abbot's place, the superior of the monastery being termed prior. Other priories were originally offshoots from the larger abbeys, to the abbots of which they continued subordinate; but in later times the actual distinction between abbeys and priories was lost.

The earliest Christian monastic communities (see MONASTICISM) with which we are acquainted consisted of groups of cells or huts collected about a common centre, which was usually the abode of some anchorite celebrated for superior holiness or singular asceticism, but without any attempt at orderly arrangement. The formation of such communities in the East does not date from the introduction of Christianity. The example had been already set by the Essenes in Judea and the Therapeutae in Egypt.

In the earliest age of Christian monasticism the ascetics were accustomed to live singly, independent of one another, at no great distance from some village, supporting themselves by the labour of their own hands, and distributing the surplus after the supply of their own scanty wants to the poor. Increasing religious fervour, aided by persecution, drove them farther and farther away from the abodes of men into mountain solitudes or lonely deserts. The deserts of Egypt swarmed with the ``cells'' or huts of these anchorites. Anthony, who had retired to the Egyptian Thebaid during the persecution of Maximin, A.D. 312, was the most celebrated among them for his austerities, his sanctity, and his power as an exorcist. His fame collected round him a host of followers, emulous of his sanctity. The deeper he withdrew into the wilderness, the more numerous his disciples became. They refused to be separated from him, and built their ceils round that of their spiritual father. Thus arose the first monastic community, consisting of anchorites living each in his own little dwelling, united together under one superior. Anthony, as Neander remarks (Church History, vol. iii. p. 316, Clark's trans.), ``without any conscious design of his own, had become the founder of a new mode of living in common, Coenobitism.'' By degrees order was introduced in the groups of huts. They were arranged in lines like the tents in an encampment, or the houses in a street. From this arrangement these lines of single cells came to be known as Laurae, Laurai, "streets" or "lanes."

The real founder of coenobian koinos, common, and bios, life) monasteries in the modern sense was Pachomius, an Egyptian of the beginning of the 4th century. The first community established by him was at Tabennae, an island of the Nile in Upper Egypt. Eight others were founded in his lifetime, numbering 3000 monks. Within fifty years from his death his societies could reckon 50,000 members. These coenobia resembled vilIages, peopled by a hard-working religious community, ail of one sex. The buildings were detached, small and of the humblest character. Each cell or hut, according to Sozomen (H.R. iii. 14), contained three monks. They took their chief meal in a common refectory at 3 P.M., up to which hour they usually fasted. They ate in silence, with hoods so drawn over their faces that they could see nothing but what was on the table before them. The monks spent all the time, not devoted to religious services or study, in manual labour. Palladius, who visited the Egyptian monasteries about the close of the 4th century, found among the 300 members of the coenobium of Panopolis, under the Pachomian rule, 15 tailors, 7 smiths, 4 carpenters, 12 cameldrivers and 15 tanners. Each separate community had its own oeconomus or steward, who was subject to a chief oeconomus stationed at the head establishment. All the produce of the monks' labour was committed to him, and by him shipped to Alexandria. The money raised by the sale was expended in the purchase of stores for the support of the communities, and what was over was devoted to charity. Twice in the year the superiors of the several coenobia met at the chief monastery, under the presidency of an archimandrite (``the chief of the fold,'' from miandra, a fold), and at the last meeting gave in reports of their administration for the year. The coenobia of Syria belonged to the Pachomian institution. We learn many details concerning those in the vicinity of Antioch from Chrysostom's writings. The monks lived in separate huts, kalbbia, forming a religious hamlet on the mountain side. They were subject to an abbot, and observed a common rule. (They had no refectory, but ate their common meal, of bread and water only, when the day's labour was over, reclining on strewn grass, sometimes out of doors,) Four times in the day they joined in prayers and psalms.