Patrick Comerford
The Diocese of Oxford has more church buildings than any other diocese in the Church of England and has more paid clergy than any other diocese except London. The diocese includes Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, with another five churches in nearby counties.
The Diocese of Oxford was formed out of part of the Diocese of Lincoln in 1542, and Osney Abbey was designated the original cathedral. This was changed in 1545 to Saint Frideswide’s Priory, which became Christ Church Cathedral.
During my visit to Oxford last week, I went in search of Osney Abbey, later Osney Cathedral. But the site was difficult to find and there few remains of the ruins of the former abbey or cathedral could be sees. The site is south of the Botley Road, down Mill Street and close to Osney Cemetery. I found it a few steps west of the railway line, just south of Oxford Station and 300-400 metres south-west of the Church of Saint Thomas the Martyr – although the two are now separated by the railway line, linked to each other by a lengthy footbridge.
Osney Abbey was founded as an Augustinian priory in 1129, and became an abbey in 1154. It was one of the four renowned monastic houses of mediaeval Oxford, along with the Augustinian Saint Frideswide’s Priory (now Christ Church), Rewley Abbey of the Cistercians, on the north side of Osney Island, and the nunnery at Godstow Abbey.
Visiting the few sparse remains of Osney Abbey last week, it is difficult to imagine how this was also one of the great houses of the Augustinian Canons Regular in mediaeval England, alongside Saint Osyth’s Priory in Essex, Cirencester Abbey in Gloucestershire, and Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate, in London, as well as Llanthony Priory in Wales.
At the dissolution of the monastic houses during the Tudor Reformation, Osney Abbey was surrendered and briefly served as the cathedral of the new Diocese of Oxford, and the last Abbot of Osney, Robert King, became the first Bishop of Oxford.
However, little remains of the abbey today, and what is still standing is difficult to find, at the end of a narrow street, between the railway line and the river. The current navigation of the River Thames, replacing the old navigation to the east side of Osney Island, is believed to have been engineered by the canons of the abbey to turn their mill.
Osney Abbey was founded as Saint Mary’s Church on Osney Island, immediately west of Oxford Castle, almost 900 years ago in 1129 by Robert D’Oyly, Governor of Oxford and nephew of Robert D’Oyly, who built Oxford Castle. His wife Edith Forne wanted to atone for her past life as the mistress of Henry I, and encouraged her husband to found the priory.
The foundation of the priory is associated with her story of chattering magpies, interpreted by a chaplain as souls in Purgatory who needed the foundation of a monastery to free them from their sins.
Edith was buried in Osney Abbey in a religious habit. John Leland describes seeing her tomb on the eve of the dissolution: ‘Ther lyeth an image of Edith, of stone, in th’ abbite of a vowess, holding a hart in her right hand, on the north side of the high altaire’. The legendary dream of magpies was painted near the tomb.
When the Augustinian Priory in Osney was founded 1129, it was a house for 26 canons. After the priory became an abbey in 1154, it became one of the most important monastic houses in England.
The Augustinians of Osney provided six of the canons for Henry II’s re-foundation of the Church of the Holy Cross, Waltham, as an Augustinian house in 1177. When this became Waltham Abbey in 1184, the first abbot was a canon of Osney. The church of Saint George in Oxford Castle was translated and annexed to the abbey in 1199.
By the 13th century, Osney Abbey had 50 canons, and the Synod of Oxford met there in May 1222. The synod was called by Archbishop Stephen Langton, and is notable for a number of decisions. The Synod implemented the anti-Jewish decrees passed by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, including laws that banned social relations between Jews and Christians, levied church tithes against Jews, forced English Jews to wear an identifying badge, and banned building new synagogues.
These laws passed at Oxford in 1222 were the precursor to further anti-Jewish statutes, in particular those passed in 1253 and 1275. This increasing intolerance culminated in the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290.
For many centuries, it was thought that the decision that Saint George’s Day should be celebrated on 23 April as a holy day in England was made at this synod, although, since the 1960s, historians have regarded this as an invention. The Synod also established celebration of the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ on 1 January, building on long-established celebrations of the start of the Julian calendar year.
When the papal legate, Cardinal Otto Candidus, visited Osney in July 1237, a brawl broke out between a group of scholars from the university and the cardinal’s men. During the brawl, the legate’s cook was killed, and the cardinal was locked for safety in the abbey tower. When he emerged unscathed, he placed the city under interdict in reprisal.
Osney Abbey was extensively rebuilt and enlarged by Abbot Leech in 1247. In the 13th century, the abbey was engaged in a large banking business, enabling it to invest in property in Oxford. The abbey’s endowments included the Manor of Water Eaton, the Island of Osney, some rents and property in Oxford, churches in Watlington, Kidlington, Hook Norton, Weston-on-the-Green, Chastleton, with Claydon in Buckinghamshire, and Shenstone near Lichfield in Staffordshire.
Eventually the house had property in more than 120 places, scattered across Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Staffordshire, Northamptonshire, with small possessions in Herefordshire, Leicestershire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Middlesex, and Bedfordshire. It also had two churches in Ireland, Kiltevenan (now Kiltinan), near Fethard, Co Tipperary, and Balibrenan, and other lands.
The number of canons was reduced from 50 to 27 after the Black Death in 1377. By 1445, the abbey consisted of the abbot and 26 canons, two of whom were absent, in Bibury and in Ireland.
Osney Island included Osney Abbey and Osney Mill, and the place plays a minor but significant role in the notoriously bawdy ‘Miller’s Tale’ in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
In 1481, the Abbot of Osney was granted permission to wear a mitre, and to confer minor orders on the novices.
When the Bishop of Lincoln made a visitation to Osney in 1499, the abbey was in debt and the buildings were out of repair. The abbot was ordered not to spend more than 40 marks a year on clothes, food and fire, until the debts of the house were paid. He was to have but one cook and one butler, and was to have the manor of Medley for his residence. No strangers were to be invited to feasts at the expense of the abbey, no canon was to be allowed to go into Oxford except for study or for reasonable cause, and the prior was not to frequent taverns and disreputable places.
The visitations in 1518 and 1520 show the abbey had an abbot, 19 canons, including one in Ireland, and six novices. One of the canons, named Taunton, was described as utterly irreligious and unwilling to rise to mattins more than once in a month. After he had been corrected many times, he was banished to the property of the monastery in Ireland, but then fled to the Bishop of Lincoln. The abbot excommunicated him for this, and the bishop in return excommunicated the abbot. The canons complained that by excommunicating the abbot the bishop had brought discredit on their house.
Another canon is described as utterly irreligious, a fomenter of strife, one who threatened with a dagger those with whom he disagreed. The debts of the house were estimated by one canon at £500, by another at £800, while the income was estimated at £730.
One of the canons had spoken contumelious words of the bishop in 1520, saying 'that he caryd not a teide for his malice.' By then, Taunton was back at Osney and incarcerated, but the bishop showed that he was not entirely satisfied with the state of things, by adjourning his visitation for nine months instead of dissolving or closing it.
The abbot resigned in 1524, and was allowed a pension of £60. He was succeeded by the Prior of Saint Frideswide’s, which at the time was in the process of suppression.
Sir John Tregonwell and Dean Richard Layton were the principal agents of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell at the Dissolution of the Monasteries. They visited Osney in September 1535, and issued injunctions that no canon should leave the precincts for any cause.
Against these orders the abbot, John Burton, protested to Cromwell, saying he could not receive his rents nor see to the repairs of his manors. He said Osney stood very low and in a wet situation, ‘and I was brought up in wholesome ground of the King’s College, sometime called the monastery of Saint Frideswide.’ He argued that if he remained continuously at Osney his life would be shortened.
The abbots of Osney and Eynsham were accused in January 1537 of speaking ‘obtrectuous’ words against the king, but this was dismissed as merely the wild invention of a crazy talebearer, John Parkyns.
Osney Abbey was surrendered to the king in November 1539 and dissolved. The last abbot was Robert King, a suffragan Bishop of Lincoln who subsequently became the first Bishop of Oxford. As he was a Cistercian monk and Abbot of Thame, he must have been temporarily appointed to Osney, with his elevation to bishop in view.
From September 1542 until June 1544, Osney Abbey was the seat of the new Bishops of Oxford. However, Osney was costly to run as a cathedral and in 1545 the bishop moved to the smaller and cheaper cathedral at Christ Church. Later, during the reign of Queen Mary, King was one of the judges at the trial of Thomas Cranmer.
The abbey buildings soon fell into decay and were despoiled for the sake of the new foundation. Much of the stone found its way into local buildings, including Saint Frideswide’s as it was transformed into Christ Church.
Osney Abey has been described as the greatest building Oxford has lost. Great Tom, the bell described as the ‘loudest thing in Oxford,’ now hanging in Tom Tower at Christ Church, was taken from the tower of Osney Abbey at the dissolution. A good deal of the monastic property was also transferred to Christ Church, and the remains of the abbey became a source of building material for the city.
During the Civil War, the former abbey was used to fortify the city and an explosion in a powder house in 1643 caused further damage. The remaining west tower was pulled down a few years later.
The site was leased to a clothier, the iron, glass and woodwork were removed and most of the old buildings were demolished. The much reduced ruins were later drawn by Thomas Hearne of Saint Edmund Hall in 1720.
All the buildings have since been destroyed, apart from a rubble and timber-framed structure that may date from the 15th century. The remnants were Grade II listed in 1954.
Osney has about 200 households today, mainly in 19th-century terraced cottages built on a grid pattern by George Hester to house railway workers. The island also has two public houses, and is part of the Oxford ward of Jericho and Osney.
The long disused Osney Mill has been converted to housing, close to Osney Lock. To the east is Osney Cemetery and the site of the abbey includes Osney Mill Marina, on a 500 metre long island originally formed for the mill. To the north are Oxford railway station and Botley Road, the busy road west out of Oxford.
Last year, the 800th anniversary of the Synod of Oxford at Osney in 1222 was marked at a service in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, in May 2022, attended by Christians and Jews. Archbishop Justin Welby described it as ‘an opportunity to remember, repent and rebuild.’
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