Abingdon Abbey 1

23 SEPTEMBER 2013 ABINGDON ABBEY 1 Release Version notes Who date Current version: H1-Abingdon-2013-1 23/9/13 Original version RS Previous versions: ———— This text is made available through the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs License; additional terms may apply Authors for attribution statement: Charters of William II and Henry I Project Richard Sharpe, Faculty of History, University of Oxford ABINGDON ABBEY Benedictine abbey of St Mary County of Berkshire : Diocese of Salisbury Refounded as a Benedictine abbey, c. 954 The extraordinary series of surviving writs and writ-charters issued by King Henry for Abingdon abbey results from a combination of particular circumstances. Abbot Faritius, an Italian monk who held the abbey from November 1100 until his death on 23 February 1117, was closely associated with the king and members of his court.1 He had been Henry’s physician, and he had administered medical help to grateful members of the king’s trusted circle. In 1101 Faritius and Grimaldus the physician attended the queen during her first confinement. A personal association between the two physicians is reflected in the fact that, out of eighteen authentic acts witnessed by Grimaldus, eleven were for Abingdon during Faritius’s abbacy. In the early years of the reign Faritius very likely attended the king’s court, though he does not himself appear in witness- lists. Heads of monastic houses very rarely witnessed writ-charters, so no significance may be attached to this negative. Faritius was better placed 1 K. L. Shirley, ‘Faricius of Abingdon and the king’s court’, Haskins Society Journal 9 (1997), 175–84. His book The Secular Jurisdiction of Monasteries in Anglo-Norman and Angevin England (Woodbridge, 2004), draws many examples from Faritius’s adminstration at Abingdon. 23 SEPTEMBER 2013 ABINGDON ABBEY 2 to request documents than many heads of religious houses, and he appears to have had favoured access to both king and queen. He used it, showing remarkable persistence in obtaining both charters and writs, even in matters that did not require royal involvement. Abingdon abbey had a history of litigation in William I’s reign and knew the value of a well-documented case. At the beginning of his abbacy he needed to recover property alienated during the vacancy—not an unusual situation—but it may have set him on a pattern of obtaining royal documents, which his successors did not follow. The history of litigation may help to explain another fundamental reason for the rich surviving archive. The abbey produced a historian in the 1160s whose concerns were centred on the abbey’s landed properties; he was interested also in disputes about them, and he inserted documents into his narrative, including many from Henry’s reign that were writs of only short-lived use. Abbot Faritius’s own extensive acquisitions of land were made possible because of those connexions with the king’s circle, and several of the largest reflect gratitude for his medical services to leading men at court. He found an ideal historian in the narrator of the 1160s, who devoted half his account of the post-conquest period to the sixteen years of Faritius’s abbacy and almost half of that to transcriptions of royal and other documents. The writer’s nearly comprehensive inclusion of royal acts adds force to comparisons with what he copied from other reigns, and, during Henry’s time, for other abbots: it shows that the frequency of resort to the great seal by Abbot Faritius, especially before 1110, was by any standard exceptional. The resulting archive is the largest to survive for Henry I’s reign from any beneficiary. Its nearest rival is that of Ramsey abbey, with some seventy document, more than half of them writs. The main source for the archive is the twelfth-century documentary history, surviving in two copies, both of them in the Cotton Library and therefore well known to seventeenth-century antiquaries. Joseph Stevenson’s edition of the Abingdon history was one of the first texts to be published in the Rolls Series, with the consequence that the Abingdon archive made an early contribution to our understanding of Anglo-Norman government. Some two thirds of the ninety or so acts of Henry I contained here were sufficiently datable for Farrer to include them in his itinerary of Henry I, a considerably higher proportion than with the Ramsey archive. This may be more a matter of chance than any reflection of Abbot Faritius’s connexions. Documents in his favour were witnessed by men whose careers are datable more often than is seen in other well preserved 23 SEPTEMBER 2013 ABINGDON ABBEY 3 archives. In particular, the documents collected in such numbers by Faritius were for the most part obtained in his first years in office, a fact established by the fact that some of their recurrent witnesses came to the end of their careers at court early in Henry I’s reign: Roger Bigod (13 acts) died in 1107, Urse d’Abetot (5) in 1108, while Robert fiz Haimo (4) was incapacitated in the spring of 1105 and Robert Malet (3) disappears from the record in 1106. It is no more than an accident of circumstance that this leads to the relatively close dating of so many acts in this archive. The narrative settings provided by the Abingdon history further assisted Farrer in dating documents. As a consequence, therefore, of the bulk of surviving material, its early accessibility, and its relative amenability to dating and connected interpretation, the archive of Abingdon abbey has played a major role in our developing knowledge of the royal documents of Henry I’s reign. In the field of diplomatic, it was on the basis of the Abingdon archive that W. H. Stevenson first articulated the importance of the address to the shire court (‘An inedited charter of King Henry I’, EHR 21 (1906), 506), and a high proportion of documented Anglo-Norman lawsuits derives from this archive. It is, of course, not irrelevant that Abingdon was one of the ten richest abbeys in England in 1086. John Hudson, whose new edition of the Abingdon history has been an enormous help in presenting the acts of Henry I contained in it, calculates that the landed income of the abbey at the time of the Domesday survey was between £510 and £540 per year (Hudson, vol. ii, pp. lxxiv–lxxv). This would have grown substantially as a consequence of Faritius’s additions to the estate. By the time Abbot Faritius died, the prior was able to satisfy the community’s needs and at the same time render £300 p.a. to the king; the Abingdon historian remarks that they ‘had every abundance of provisions and clothing’ during the four-year vacancy (Stevenson, ii. 158–9; Hudson, ii. 224, § 229). The total income of the abbey also included an unknown amount from its market in Abingdon, its judicial privileges and other customs, not to mention offerings from the faithful. At the beginning of Henry’s reign, there were problems. The abbey had been vacant for some time, like many others during the latter part of William II’s reign. Abbot Rainald had fallen out of favour with the king at some point and died in 1097 (Stevenson, ii. 42; Hudson, ii. 60, § 51). For more than three years the custodian had been Modbert, a monk of the abbey, who alienated monastic property to benefit members of the king’s court (000, 000). Henry filled the abbacy some four months 23 SEPTEMBER 2013 ABINGDON ABBEY 4 after his coronation, choosing his physician Faritius, who was a monk and the cellarer of Malmesbury. He was appointed on 1 November 1100, though the writ of appointment has not been preserved ({1}). On 11 November three writs for Abingdon abbey were dated on the king’s wedding day ({2–4}). With the support of both king and queen, Faritius set about reasserting the abbey’s rights, recovering lost estates, and adding to its property. Already before Easter 1101 he had obtained two writs to assist in this process ({5–6}). King Henry had known Abingdon since he was a boy. In 1084 King William ordered his youngest son to stay there for Easter, while father and brothers were in Normandy (Stevenson, ii. 14; Hudson, ii. 16– 18, § 15). The young Henry’s entourage was headed by Bishop Osmund of Salisbury and Miles Crispin, constable of Wallingford castle, and we may presume that they were lodged in the king’s houses just south of the abbey on Andersey Island, a favourite lodging of William I. At some point in the 1090s Henry had as a mistress Ansfrid, widow of Anskill, who was a baron of the abbot’s honour (ib. §§ 45, 178); she would visit Henry, but where is not made clear. On her death, the monks gave her burial in the cloister of the abbey. In the second year after his accession, Henry gave the king’s houses on the island, now said to be neglected and dilapidated, to the monks; the gift rewarded Abbot Faritius for his attendance on the queen during her first confinement (000, 000, 000). Henry must have passed through Abingdon frequently, on the route between Winchester and Woodstock, and on likely routes between Windsor and Woodstock or even Westminster and Woodstock. Only one act of King Henry, however, is place-dated at Abingdon (000, Regesta 1258), though we hear also of Queen Matilda’s passing through at a time when the king was in Normandy (000, Regesta 674). There is no sign that either King Henry or Queen Matilda were especially devoted to the interests of Abingdon abbey.

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