Historic Description of Winchcombe Abbey, Site of

Winchcombe Abbey

Is within two miles of Hailes, but will be dealt with very briefly, for no vestige of the Abbey remains. Had there not been an adequate parish church, some part of the Abbey church would have been preserved. But there was and is a very handsome Perpendicular church which is quite worth a visit. It has on its tower the finest possible weathercock, reported to have come from St Mary Redcliffe’s at Bristol, and inside is a very charming organ case as old as the seventeenth century at least. Some small fragments of carving from the site of the Abbey are also kept there, and some tiles.

The Abbey was a Benedictine house, large and rich. The foundation was asserted to have been as early as 798, and its founder to have been Kenulph, King of Mercia. In or after 821 it became the resting place of the boy-saint King Kenelm, murdered by the order of his wicked sister Quendreda at Clent. In the Abbey was preserved the Psalter which she was reading when the solemn procession bearing her brother’s corpse passed her window. With evil intent she was saying the savage CIXth psalm backwards, and when she reached the verse, “Let it thus happen from the Lord unto mine enemies,” her eyes fell out of her head on to the book, which ever after showed the blood stain.

The monastery was regularised by St Oswald of Worcester in 985. The annual value at the Suppression was £759. Lord Seymour destroyed all the buildings. They stood, it seems, north and east of the parish church. I do not thing any monastic house that could be classed with this has so totally disappeared. When Browne Willis visited it early in the eighteenth century, he met an old man who pointed out the site of the church to him, but could tell him little about it. There were then some outlying domestic buildings, but even these are gone.

Share this page on the Social Networks