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Updated: June 22, 2025
Men are slow to conceive what might have been nay, what almost was in their national history; it seems difficult to our generation to imagine Westminster Abbey absent only from the national life; yet Abingdon is gone, all but a gateway, Reading all but a few ruined walls, Chertsey has utterly disappeared, so has Osney, so has Sheen to mention the great river houses alone: Westminster alone survives, and the only reason it survives is that it had about it at the time of the destruction of the monasteries a royal flavour, and that its existence helped to bolster up the Tudors.
At the time of its dissolution, on the first of January 1538, in spite of the much higher value of money in the sixteenth century as compared with the thirteenth, it stands worth over £500: £10,000 a year. Osney also dated from the early twelfth century, and was almost contemporary with Reading.
Soldiers from the castle rode clashing through the narrow streets; the bells of Osney clanged from the swampy meadows; long processions of pilgrims wound past the Jewry to the shrine of Saint Frideswide.
Upon his way beneath the old stone bridge which crossed the ford, and shooting between the lifted paddles of the weirs, he would, once below Oxford, have seen much the same pastures that we see to-day; but in a few hours Abingdon, the next to Osney, would have fixed his eyes as Osney had before.
To the west of the town rose one of the stateliest of English castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly less stately Abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north the last of the Norman kings raised his palace of Beaumont. The canons of St.
On all but its eastern side indeed the town was narrowly hemmed in by jurisdictions independent of its own. The precincts of the Abbey of Osney, the wide bailly of the castle, bounded it narrowly on the west. To the north, stretching away to the little church of St. Giles, lay the fields of the royal manor of Beaumont.
The English bitterly hated the foreign clergy, and quarrels were forever breaking out. When Otho, the legate, was passing through Oxford, and lodging at Osney Abbey, a terrible fray occurred.
There was left only one alternative flight or death. The loyal six set spurs to their horses; and Surrey's steed being fleetest, he soon outdistanced the others. All that night Surrey rode at a breathless gallop, and when morning broke he was dashing past Osney Abbey into the gates of Oxford. Exeter came up an hour or two later; the rest followed afterwards.
The annals of the abbeys of Waverley, Dunstable, and Burton, which have been published in the "Annales Monastici" of the Rolls series, add important details for the reigns of John and Henry III. Those of Melrose, Osney, and Lanercost help us in the close of the latter reign, where help is especially welcome.
The same punster who described fortification as two twenty fications, would call this a Grose blunder. When Robert D'Oiley, in the reign of Henry V. built the abbey at Osney, for monks and regulars, and gave them the revenues, &c. of the church of St.
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