The Lost Abbey Of Eynsham

Eynsham was one of the few religious foundations in England in continuous use from the late Saxon period to the Dissolution. This book aims to rescue this important abbey from obscurity by summarising its history and examining its material remains, most of which have never been published before.

Burnham Norton Friary, one of the first Carmelite houses founded in England (1242-47), was dissolved in 1538. Its remains comprise the restored gatehouse, west gable of the church rebuilt as a barn, Friary Cottage and an open space which was once the precinct. The post-Dissolution history of monastic sites has generally not been well studied. At Norton, nothing was known of its owners between 1561 and 1914, what relationships, if any, they had, or how they used the site. The fate of the Friary buildings was poorly understood and details of the gatehouse restoration unknown. In this pioneering study, Sally Francis uses both modern archival research and a survey of local houses to recover the history and something of the architecture of the friary. Between 1538 and 1848 the church became a barn and the rest of the site was used as a farmstead. In 1848, its owner restored the gatehouse (1848/9), saving it from dereliction, but cleared away the farm buildings to turn the site into an 'Antiquarian relic.' Studying the post-Dissolution history of the site has been a valuable exercise. It not only allows that phase of the site to be understood, it also illuminates aspects of the site's earlier history, which, given the loss of the Friary's own archives, could not otherwise be studied.

Though best known today for his Old English homilies, the Anglo-Saxon scholar Ælfric also composed a Latin 'letter' to his fellow monks at Eynsham (Oxfordshire) containing a detailed outline of their daily and seasonal round of prayer and other duties. The document offers a rare glimpse of what ordinary monks in Anglo-Saxon England were expected to know and do. This 1999 book contains an edition of the Latin letters a textual commentary, and a complete English translation of the work. Dr Jones also provides substantial introductory chapters which establish the exceptional importance of the Eynsham letter for our understanding of late Anglo-Saxon monasticism and liturgy. The book will interest students of early medieval culture, monasticism and Church history.

A new study of the heraldry, genealogy and history of the Canterbury Cathedral cloister, this book is the first comprehensive study of this monument ever undertaken. It provides a detailed chronology and details on the 856 heraldic shields, badges and devices, representing some 365 families, principalities, religious foundations and individuals.

Abingdon Monastery was one of the largest and wealthiest in England, and dominated the life (and skyline) of the town for over 800 years. The monastery's building programme for the church rarely stopped throughout all that time! Due to the very thorough demolition after the dissolution of the abbey by Henry VIII, however, few abbey buildings remain, and the physical, as well as the spiritual and economic, domination of the abbey is now difficult to imagine. This booklet presents discoveries from excavations in the abbey precinct, and the plans from successive geophysical surveys since 1998, which have provided a much more detailed plan of the church, and enabled the first well-founded reconstructions of its development. It also aims to give a taste of the very wide-ranging activities of the abbey as landowner, employer and power in the town.

These essays make a case for how unified and well-governed Anglo-Saxon England was, and how numerous and wealthy its inhabitants were.