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Construction
Construction of Shrewsbury Abbey
parish church and former abbey in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England, UK
- 11th century – 11th century
- Europe
Construction
parish church and former abbey in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England, UK
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
The Abbey Church of the Holy Cross (commonly known as Shrewsbury Abbey) is an ancient foundation in Shrewsbury, the county town of Shropshire, England.
The Abbey was founded in 1083 as a Benedictine monastery by the Norman Earl of Shrewsbury, Roger de Montgomery. It grew to be one of the most important and influential abbeys in England, and an important centre of pilgrimage. Although much of the Abbey was destroyed in the 16th century, the nave survived as a parish church, and today serves as the mother church for the Parish of Holy Cross.
The Abbey is a Grade I listed building and is a member of the Greater Churches Group. It is located to the east of Shrewsbury town centre, near the English Bridge, and is surrounded by a triangular area which is today referred to as Abbey Foregate.
Before the Norman Conquest of England, a small Saxon chapel dedicated to St Peter stood outside the east gate of Shrewsbury; it had been built by Siward, son of Ethelgar and a close relative of Edward the Confessor. There was still a landowner, known as Siward the Fat, in Shropshire in the Domesday Book of 1086, although he had owned many more estates in 1066. He must have been the donor of the two estates the church is known from Domesday to have held in 1066: at Boreton near Condover and Lowe near Farley. However, the Abbey had lost Lowe by 1087.
When Roger de Montgomery received Shropshire from William the Conqueror in 1071, he gave the church to one of his clerks, Odelerius of Orléans, the father of the historian Orderic Vitalis, who is the main source for the foundation of the Abbey and probably an eye-witness. Orderic stresses his father's role in persuading Earl Roger to commit himself to building a monastery and stresses that Odelerius from the outset wanted it to be Benedictine. The specific purpose was to benefit Earl Roger's soul.
Unde generositatem vestram, gloriose consul, fideliter admoneo ut, dum licet, in comitatu vestro (quem jure a patribus non consecutus es haereditario) monachile castrum contra Satanan construatur Deo; ubi pro anima vesita cucullati pugiles Behemoth conflictu resistent assiduo.
Translation:
I therefore offer to you, most noble earl, my faithful advice, that while it is in your power, you call a stronghold for monks against Satan to be built for the service of God in the chief seat of your earldom, which is not yours by inheritance from your ancestors, in order that these cowled combatants may withstand the devil in continual conflict for the good of your soul.
On 25 February 1083 Earl Roger summoned his senior officials, including Warin, the Sheriff of Shropshire and Picot de Say, and publicly pledged himself to found a new Abbey, laying his gloves on the altar of St. Peter and granting the whole suburb outside the east gate for the construction. Reginald and Frodo, two monks from the great Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Martin-de-Séez in Southern Normandy, formed the nucleus of the new community, and began to plan and build the monks' lodging, working with Odelerius and Warin. The Domesday Book found the abbey under construction: "In the City of SHREWSBURY Earl Roger is building an Abbey and has given to it the monastery of St Peter where the parish (church?) of the City was." This suggests that Siward's foundation was already a monastery before Earl Roger began building but it is fairly certain there was no more than a wooden parish church.
When sufficiently complete (probably late in 1087), regular life began under the first abbot, Fulchred of Sées. The Abbey of Saint-Martin-de-Sées was closely associated with Shrewsbury in the early years because Earl Roger was its founder and he and the House of Bellême, into which he had married, were also major benefactors there, as were Roger's knights. A notification lodged at Sées in 1086 by Robert of Bellême, Roger's son, who was later to become 3rd Earl of Shrewsbury, shows that they used the monks as witnesses in their property deals and custodians of the documents. About the time he recruited Abbot Fulchred or Foucher, Earl Roger made a huge grant of estates in England to Sées, for the soul of recently deceased William the Conqueror, as well as of Queen Matilda and of Roger himself and his dead wife Mabel de Bellême. Some of these were estates he had originally intended for Mabel. It seems that Sées Abbey for a time harboured plans to claim jurisdiction over Shrewsbury and it also contested some properties granted by Earl Roger; however, Shrewsbury became independent.
Once it was safely under the leadership of Fulchred, Odelerius placed Benedict, one of his sons, in Shrewsbury Abbey as an oblate, with a gift of 200 silver livres. Both Odelerius himself and Earl Roger met their deaths as monks of the Abbey.
Earl Roger and his associates added several estates and other sources of income to Shrewsbury Abbey's endowment, which had been valued at £46 18s. in 1086, before the first abbot was appointed. As well as rural manors, the abbey had urban property, mills, and the tithes and advowsons of many churches. However, Orderic, a shrewd observer, tells us that Roger only "moderately endowed with lands and rents" (terris ac redditibus mediocriter locupletavit). Moreover, there was a long wait ahead before some of the endowments were to materialise.
The abbey's modest but sufficient wealth was threatened, before many of the grants were confirmed by royal charter, when Earl Roger's son, Robert of Bellême, revolted against Henry I in 1102. The king exiled and expropriated his unruly vassal and the patronage of the abbey escheated to the Crown. This deprived the abbey of powerful local protection and gave the descendants and successors of donors an opportunity to wriggle out of their obligations. For example, Siward had given up any claims he might have to the abbey site in return for a life-time grant from Earl Roger of the estate of Langafeld, now Cheney Longville, which would pass to the abbey on his death. Siward's son, Aldred, refused to surrender the estate to the abbey until Abbot Fulchred gave him £15. This arrangement was engineered by Richard de Belmeis I, later Bishop of London, whom the king had sent to exercise viceregal powers in Shropshire after Earl Robert's expropriation. However, Richard was not to be trusted. On his death bed in 1127 he admitted to his confessors that he had lied about his tenure of Betton in Berrington, which really belonged to Shrewsbury Abbey – probably a grant from Robert de Limesey, then Bishop of Chester His confessor tried to clear up the matter by stating the facts to the interested parties. Although Richard had directed that the estate be restored to Shrewsbury Abbey, its status was contested by his lay successors for decades. In 1127 Philip de Belmeis sued for the estate, although he quickly defaulted. His younger son, Ranulph, tried again a few decades later, but gave up in return for acceptance into the abbey's lay fraternity. As late as 1212 Roger de la Zouche launched a fresh suit, in which he persisted for years, unsuccessfully. These were only examples of a morass of complex litigation into which the abbey was drawn.
However, Henry I himself seems to have been supportive of Shrewsbury Abbey, especially when in the vicinity. He confirmed Robert's gift of land Baschurch to Fulchred, perhaps while actually campaigning against Robert in Shropshire and Staffordshire. He also took Fulchred's side in a variety of disputes with officials of the royal forests in Shropshire and reminded local officials and barons that the abbey was exempt from all customs, as in the time of Earl Roger.
After this initial support, however, there was a long delay before the king took further action on the monastery's behalf. It is unclear when Abbot Fulchred died, but it was certainly some years before 1121, when Henry at last came to the support of Godfrey, the second abbot, with a series of charters. Some of these, at least, were issued within Shropshire: at Bridgnorth, Condover and Shrewsbury itself. These included a general statement of principle that the new abbot was to enjoy the same estates and privileges as his predecessor. Note was taken that the abbey had exchanged Henry de Say's manor of Brompton, south of Shrewsbury, for Siward's former estate of Cheney Longville in an attempt to improve management and economise by concentrating resources. Two documents announced and confirmed Henry's own valuable gift of multure or mill-right to the abbey within Shrewsbury. As the monks were to receive the miller's fee for all grain ground in the town, they had a monopoly over milling, and no-one else was allowed to grind corn without their permission. As it was related to the water power of the Severn and its tributaries, the king attached to the grant a monopoly over fisheries at both of the town's bridges. The newly appointed Bishop of Hereford, the ambitious royal administrator Richard de Capella, whose diocese included a large part of southern Shropshire, was specifically warned not to let the king hear of any complaints against himself in relation to the Abbey.
In 1137/38 Robert of Shrewsbury, who was prior under the third and fourth abbots, Herbert and Ralph, negotiated and carried out the translation of the remains of St Winifred from Gwytherin in Wales. Robert is thought to have been a member of the Pennant family of Downing, a few miles north-west of Holywell, the main shrine and fountain of Saint Winifred. He wrote a life of the saint shortly after the translation, adding an account of his mission to Wales, which is the main source of information about the events. The body was disinterred and borne ceremoniously to Shrewsbury, a week's journey on foot and thus encumbered. There it was laid in the church of St Giles to await the blessing of the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. Overnight a youth was enabled to walk again by the presence of the reliquary. It was taken in procession into the town. The expectation of an episcopal blessing ensured it was witnessed by "an incredible concourse of devout people" as it was taken to be placed on the altar of the Abbey church, where further miracles were reported. The relics were later enshrined in the abbey.
Robert is generally accepted as responsible for strengthening the cult of Winifred, who had hitherto been an obscure Welsh saint, so that she became the focus of pilgrimages from Shrewsbury and other centres from the 14th century to the present. Later he became the fifth abbot and, although little is known of his abbacy, he seems to have been zealous in pursuing the abbey's interests against local rivals. He was successful in recovering two portions of the tithes of Emstrey parish church which had been granted "against conscience and the consent of his convent" by Abbot Ralph to the church at Atcham. Emstrey was a large parish, which stretched from the western bank of the River Severn opposite Atcham to the Abbey Foregate. The Abbey cartulary contains an instrument by which the Archbishop, Theobald of Bec, orders Bishop Walter to restore the tithes to the abbey. The underlying rivalry was not between the Shrewsbury Abbey and the little church of St Eata, but between the Shrewsbury and its Augustinian rival, Lilleshall Abbey which was tightening its grip on Atcham manor and parish, apparently to expand it across the Severn. Its ownership of the ferry crossing at Atcham was an important source of income for Lilleshall. It had recently acquired the advowson of Atcham church, and was later allowed to appropriate the church by Thomas Becket. By the beginning of the Plantagenet era Shrewsbury Abbey faced considerable competition for resources from major monasteries in the vicinity. As well as Lilleshall, technically a royal foundation, but effectively the creation of the brothers Philip and Richard de Belmeis II, there was Haughmond Abbey, another large Augustinian house closely connected with the FitzAlan family, and Buildwas Abbey, a large Cistercian house that received gifts from many of the local nobility, including the Belmeis and FitzAlans.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Shrewsbury Abbey”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.