It’s been a while since I posted about something purely medieval, and so today seemed a good opportunity to do so, talking about one of my favourite English towns.
Romsey is a charming, well-to-do town about 7 miles from Southampton Airport, in the south of England. The town centre offers a mix of lovely shops, restaurants and pubs on winding streets and lined with Tudor-style frontages. The River Test flows through the community and some stunning parks, and past a picturesque old mill. The history in the town is more than evident; founded as far back as the 8th century, Romsey was a medieval market town that grew around the founding of the first church by King Edward the Elder in 907 CE.
Our connection to Romsey comes through some close friends who settled there some time ago, and who we try to visit at least once a year. The abbey is a required detour on our walks through the town, and I recall one relaxing morning in particular sitting under the trees with a cinnamon bun and coffee, enjoying the view.
I also have fond memories of visiting the nearby pub the Cocky Anchor in summer 2021 – my first holiday after the end of lockdown – where the back beer garden offered great views of the abbey church.
The pub is just off the nearby market square, from which you have easy access to the abbey, along Church Street and down Church place.
A visit to the abbey does not take particularly long, as you can walk around the outside in less than 5 minutes, unless like me you enjoy a much slower wander to take in the view. We always start off heading down Church Place, where the first view you see is this one, the east end of the church.
To the right of the path is the churchyard, which was the burial ground attached to the abbey. There are several memorials including a large cross and a Waterloo memorial, though the majority of the monuments were removed when the yard was cleared and levelled in the 1940s. The reasons for this appears to be safety-related, as the area had become very uneven and dangerous to traverse, and many of the stones were re-purposed to create a path.
Ahead at the edge of the churchyard is Folly House, the former vicarage, now a beautiful residence. From here you could go in either direction down Church Lane or a street creatively called ‘the Abbey’ to enjoy more of the stunning houses and gardens of Romsey’s town centre.
Continuing counter-clockwise around the church takes you to one of my favourite views, looking along the outside wall and up to the central tower – in all fairness, this diagonal view looking from the base of a church up to the tower is my favourite view of any ecclesiastical building. We come this way almost every time we visit Romsey, yet I find it impossible not to get another version, in different light of course…
On this south side of the church is a small park with shady trees, where we enjoyed the breakfast mentioned above.
The History of Romsey Abbey
This seems a good time to go into a bit more detail about the history of the abbey. As mentioned above, it was founded in 907 and Elflaeda, the daughter of the king, was put in charge of the community, beginning a long line of royal abbesses and nuns. In 967, the abbey was re-founded in the Benedictine order by King Edgar, also known as Edgar the Peacemaker or Peaceable. The first stone nunnery and church were built around the turn of the millennium, and the abbey flourished as a place of education and safety particularly for noble and royal daughters.
The abbey was sacked in 1003 by the Danes, likely in retaliation for the St Brice’s Day Massacre. This massacre had taken place on 13 November 1002, when King Æthelred (often referred to as the Unready) had ordered the killing of all the Danes living in England at the time. The chronicles of the time indicate that it was retaliation for an assassination attempt, though it may also have been retaliation for the years of raids by Danish forces.
Following the sacking of the abbey, in the 1120s work began on the current building. This was during the reign of King Henry I and work continued under the supervision of Henry of Blois. Blois was the brother of Henry I’s successor, Stephen, whose daughter Marie was elected abbess in 1155.
Marie’s story is one of those tragic female tales of the Middle Ages that make one realise that royal women had it just as hard – if not sometimes harder – than others.
Her father King Stephen died in 1154 and then her last living brother, William, passed in 1159. On his death, she became suo jure Countess of Boulogne (essentially, countess in her own right, meaning the title was hers by birth and not marriage). Despite her position as abbess, Marie was abducted by the son of the Count of Flanders and forced into marriage. Eventually, after giving birth to several daughters, she found her marriage annulled and was permitted to return to the cloister for the last years of her life – though not to Romsey. I wish this was an unusual tale to find in the Middle Ages, but it goes without saying that it was a difficult time to be a woman, at any level of society.
Back to the abbey. The last three arches of the church, designed in an early English style, were added in the 1230s, by which time over 100 nuns were part of the community. The abbey would continue to prosper until the decimation of the population by the Black Death in the late 1340s; 80% of the nuns are reported to have died, including the Abbess, and from this point on the number of nuns remained much smaller – less than 30. Nevertheless, the abbey remained an important part of local life, functioning as a center of prayer and charity.
Unlike some less fortunate establishments, the abbey survived the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII due to the petition of four Guardians, who purchased the abbey for £100. The nuns were dispersed, but the community continued to worship in the surviving buildings.
It is still a working church to this day, with Sunday services.
On our last visit, we were finally able to get inside of the church, which has several fine examples of medieval art as well as Norman carving that echoes that seen in Durham Cathedral.
Visiting an abbey like that at Romsey is a unique opportunity to experience an ecclesiastic community that has existed for hundreds of years, both changing and evolving with the times as well as maintaining its medieval roots. The protection Romsey enjoyed after the creation of the Church of England means that it allows the full immersive experience that you cannot get at ruined abbeys like those at Jedburgh, Dryburgh, and so many more that did not survive the dissolution of monasteries in the sixteenth century. It’s also just a beautiful building, set in a lovely English town that provides the best of what the countryside has to offer. I highly recommend a journey!
The Wandering Medievalist 