# Evesham Abbey

former abbey at Evesham in Worcestershire, England, UK

Evesham, United Kingdom

Sacred place. 701 CE – 1539 CE

## Story

• Egwin of Evesham founded the abbey in a bend of the Avon after the swineherd Eof reported a vision of the Virgin Mary, with the community dated between about 701 and 710.
• The house is described both as Benedictine from the start and as a minster that became a Benedictine abbey in the tenth century, and in its heyday it was one of the wealthiest in England.
• Abbot Walter, appointed by William the Conqueror, began the Romanesque church, and later abbots added the nave, cloister, chapter house, great gate, and bell tower.
• Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester, was killed on Green Hill on 4 August 1265 and buried by the high altar of the abbey.
• The monastery was surrendered in November 1539 and suppressed that winter, and the church was demolished, leaving the bell tower and fragments of the precinct.
• Excavations from 1811 mapped the church, and in April 2023 the cloister and nave gardens reopened after repairs reckoned at about £1.3 million.

## History

Evesham Abbey stood in a loop of the River Avon, on the land of a swineherd named Eof, whose name became the town. About 701 he reported a vision of three women in the wood, and Egwin of Evesham, bishop of Worcester, believed he saw them too and took one, carrying a book and a gold cross, for the Virgin Mary. Egwin founded the church in her honour, resigned the see, and died at the house on 30 December 717, though one reckoning says 720.

The start is dated variously to 701, 702, 709, or an improbable 682. A privilege of Pope Constantine belongs to 709, and an alleged charter of 714 claims consecration on All Saints’ Day. The house is called Benedictine from the beginning and also described as a minster of about 701 that became a Benedictine abbey only in the tenth century. It lasted until 1540, longer than many later and more famous abbeys.

The old church fell under Abbot Osward around 970 and was rebuilt. After stretches of secular control, Abbot Ælfweard secured relics of Wigstan and Odulf and asserted independence from Worcester. Æthelwig, the last Saxon abbot, is said to have made a quick peace with William the Conqueror. Walter, appointed in May 1077, began the Romanesque church, and later abbots finished the nave, cloister, chapter house, great gate, and bell tower.

On 4 August 1265, during a vacancy, Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester, was killed on Green Hill in the Battle of Evesham. His mutilated body was buried by the high altar. A stone from his birthplace in France was dedicated there on 18 July 1965.

The house was surrendered on 17 November 1539. A monk’s note puts the suppression at evensong on 30 January 1539, and the abbot list puts it at vespers on 30 January 1540, with thirty-five religious stopped at the verse “He hath put down the mighty.” The church was demolished. The crown kept the bells and lead, and in 1554 Queen Mary gave the surviving bell tower to the town.

Edward Rudge excavated the church between 1811 and 1834, mapped it, and then saw much of the foundation stone removed. Later digs showed that medieval deposits survive, while the Anglo-Saxon levels under the Norman church remain largely untested. In 2022 finds elsewhere in the town, including pottery and human remains moved into a fish pond, were only tentatively linked to the abbey.

The Rudge family gave the freehold to a local trust in May 2017. Repairs reckoned at about £1.3 million made the walls and cloister arch safe. On 22 April 2023 the cloister and the line of the nave, closed for about four hundred years, were opened as gardens.

## Photographs

- [Evesham Abbey bell tower in Evesham, England. Originally built 1529-1539 by Clement Lichfield, last Abbot of Evesham. Photographed by me, 16 August 2006. — Oosoom](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Evesham_Abbey_Bell_Tower.jpg)
- [Evesham-Abbey Park — Ian Rob](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Evesham-Abbey_Park_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1826102.jpg)
- [The old arch of Evesham Abbey, an ink and wash painting by J. M. W. Turner from 1793, now in the RISD Museum, USA — J. M. W. Turner](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/J._M._W._TURNER_Evesham_Abbey.jpg)
- [Remains of Evesham Abbey — Philip Halling](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Remains_of_Evesham_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_7078950.jpg)
- [Remains of Evesham Abbey — Philip Halling](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Remains_of_Evesham_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_7078955.jpg)
- [Archway of the former Evesham Abbey, now part of the Abbey gardens. Evesham, Worcestershire, England. Late 13th century. Grade II listed. — Simon Burchell](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Archway_of_Evesham_Abbey_02.jpg)
- [Archway of the former Evesham Abbey, now part of the Abbey gardens. Evesham, Worcestershire, England. Late 13th century. Grade II listed. — Simon Burchell](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Archway_of_Evesham_Abbey_01.jpg)
- [Abbot Reginald's Wall, part of the ruins of Evesham Abbey, Evesham, Worcester, England. Medieval. Grade II listed. — Simon Burchell](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Abbot_Reginald%27s_Wall%2C_Evesham_03.jpg)
- [Abbot Reginald's Wall, part of the ruins of Evesham Abbey, Evesham, Worcester, England. Medieval. Grade II listed. — Simon Burchell](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Abbot_Reginald%27s_Wall%2C_Evesham_01.jpg)
- [Abbot Reginald's Wall, part of the ruins of Evesham Abbey, Evesham, Worcester, England. Medieval. Grade II listed. — Simon Burchell](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Abbot_Reginald%27s_Wall%2C_Evesham_02.jpg)

## Sources

- [Evesham Abbey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evesham_Abbey) — Wikipedia
- [Egwin of Evesham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egwin_of_Evesham) — Wikipedia
- [Eof](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eof) — Wikipedia
- [Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_de_Montfort,_6th_Earl_of_Leicester) — Wikipedia
- [Battle of Evesham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Evesham) — Wikipedia
- [William the Conqueror](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_the_Conqueror) — Wikipedia
- [St. Benedict](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Benedict) — Wikipedia
- [Blessed Virgin Mary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blessed_Virgin_Mary) — Wikipedia
- [The foundation of Evesham Abbey](https://www.eveshamabbey.org.uk/History/Foundation_of_the_Abbey.html) — Evesham Abbey Trust
- [Abbots of Evesham](https://www.eveshamabbey.org.uk/History/Abbots_of_Evesham.html) — Evesham Abbey Trust
- [Stages in the building of Evesham Abbey](https://www.eveshamabbey.org.uk/History/Building_the_Abbey.html) — Evesham Abbey Trust
- [The Dissolution of Evesham Abbey](https://www.eveshamabbey.org.uk/History/The_Dissolution_of_Evesham_Abbey.html) — Evesham Abbey Trust
- [Article on Evesham Abbey by David Cox](https://www.eveshamabbey.org.uk/Site/Article_by_DC_Cox.html) — Evesham Abbey Trust
- [Previous archaeology at Evesham Abbey](https://www.eveshamabbey.org.uk/Site/Previous_Archaeology.html) — Evesham Abbey Trust
- [The story of Evesham starts with Evesham Abbey](https://www.eveshamabbey.org.uk/History.html) — Evesham Abbey Trust
- [Historic Evesham Abbey reopens after £1.3m restoration](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-65358453) — BBC News
- [Evesham Abbey Gardens to reopen after £1.3 million investment](https://www.eveshamjournal.co.uk/news/23471849.evesham-abbey-gardens-reopen-1-3-million-investment/) — Evesham Journal
- [Hundreds flock to visit Abbey Gardens after £1.3 million restoration](https://www.eveshamjournal.co.uk/news/23480573.hundreds-flock-visit-abbey-gardens-1-3-million-restoration/) — Evesham Journal
- [A brief history of Evesham](https://eveshamtowncouncil.gov.uk/local-history/) — Evesham Town Council
- [The de Montfort Memorial](https://www.battlefieldstrust.com/resource-centre/battlepageview.asp?pageid=597&parentid=586) — Battlefields Trust
- [New evidence for medieval land use and settlement activity within Evesham, Worcestershire](https://www.borderarchaeology.com/new-evidence-for-medieval-land-use-and-settlement-activity-within-evesham-worcestershire/) — Border Archaeology
- [Evesham Abbey Bell Tower.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Evesham_Abbey_Bell_Tower.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Evesham-Abbey Park - geograph.org.uk - 1826102.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Evesham-Abbey_Park_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1826102.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [J. M. W. TURNER Evesham Abbey.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:J._M._W._TURNER_Evesham_Abbey.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Remains of Evesham Abbey - geograph.org.uk - 7078950.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Remains_of_Evesham_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_7078950.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Remains of Evesham Abbey - geograph.org.uk - 7078955.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Remains_of_Evesham_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_7078955.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Archway of Evesham Abbey 02.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Archway_of_Evesham_Abbey_02.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Archway of Evesham Abbey 01.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Archway_of_Evesham_Abbey_01.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Abbot Reginald's Wall, Evesham 03.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abbot_Reginald%27s_Wall,_Evesham_03.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Abbot Reginald's Wall, Evesham 01.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abbot_Reginald%27s_Wall,_Evesham_01.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Abbot Reginald's Wall, Evesham 02.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abbot_Reginald%27s_Wall,_Evesham_02.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Evesham Abbey stood in a loop of the River Avon, on ground that the river almost encloses. The earliest form of the town’s name, Eoveshomme, means the land in that bend that belonged to a man named Eof. Before the monastery the spot was remembered as uncultivated, full of thorns and brambles. A twelfth-century writer, looking back from about 1125, mentioned an older church there, perhaps built by the British. A small quantity of Roman objects has been found, and a Romano-British estate church attached to a villa has been suggested, but no one has been able to fix where any Roman settlement stood or how large it was. The town that grew up to serve the monastery began around Merstow Green and Vine Street.

What a visitor sees now is not the great church. The bell tower, 110 feet high and built in the early sixteenth century, still stands. With it remain the fifteenth-century almonry, now a museum and heritage centre; the early fourteenth-century great gate, built into the houses at 53 and 54 Merstow Green, with a vaulted passage of the same period; Abbot Reginald’s gateway and wall, dated about 1120, with a fifteenth-century room above; part of the south precinct wall, with an arched doorway; a thirteenth-century arch that led to the chapter house; a fragment of the west wall of the north transept; and the wall, blocked arches, and window of the abbey stables from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Most of the precinct is a public park. The whole area was designated a scheduled monument in 1949. By 2022 the site in general, and in particular the almonry and Abbot Reginald’s wall, were on a heritage-at-risk register because their condition was vulnerable. The tower, the almonry, the gatehouse houses, and Abbot Reginald’s gateway are protected at the highest grade of listing, and the stables at a high grade as well.

The story of the foundation begins with Eof, also called Eoves. About 701 he said that, while he was searching for a missing animal, he met three women of supernatural beauty singing in the wood. He told Egwin, bishop of Worcester. Egwin went to the place and believed he saw the same three women. One carried a book and a gold cross, and Egwin took her to be the Virgin Mary. On that sighting he decided to build a church in her honour. The standard lives call Eof a swineherd. A letter that seems to be Egwin’s own speaks of a pastor of flocks, which can mean a shepherd or a herdsman, and one monastic compilation calls Eoves a herdsman of the bishop. The abbey’s own seal shows pigs, not sheep, so the community itself pictured him as a keeper of pigs. In 1920 it was argued that his name was Eof, not Eoves, Eofes, or Eofa. Evesham is Eof’s ham, his homestead. A bronze statue of him, paid for by public subscription and made by John McKenna, was unveiled in the town on 15 June 2008. It stands in front of the town hall, at the corner of Bridge Street and Vine Street.

Egwin of Evesham, who died on 30 December 717, was a Benedictine monk and the third bishop of Worcester. He is honoured as a saint in the Catholic Church and in the Eastern Orthodox Church. He was born at Worcester into a noble family and was said to descend from the kings of Mercia. He may have been a nephew of King Æthelred of Mercia. His biographers say that king, clergy, and people together demanded that he be made bishop, and he was consecrated sometime after 693. As bishop he was remembered as a protector of orphans and widows and as a fair judge. He also pressed the local people on Christian marriage and on the celibacy of clergy. That severity made enemies. Because Æthelred was his friend, the complaints were carried to his ecclesiastical superiors. He went to Rome to ask the pope to clear him.

The journey gathered legends. He is said to have locked shackles on his feet and thrown the key into the Avon before he set out. In the Alps, when his companions were thirsty, those who doubted him dared him to pray for water as Moses had done. He lay down in prayer, and a stream broke from the rock. In Rome, while he prayed at the tomb of the apostles, a servant brought him the same key, found in the mouth of a fish just caught in the Tiber. He unlocked the irons and received the pope’s release from the charges against him. He then founded the abbey. One of the last important acts of his episcopate was his part in the first great Council of Clovesho. One later reckoning puts his death on 30 December 720. The date generally accepted is three years earlier, 30 December 717. He died at the abbey and his body was enshrined there. A life was written about 1016 by Byrhtferth, a monk of Ramsey. Another, the Vita Sancti Egwini, was written about 1130 by Dominic of Evesham, prior of the house. The tomb was destroyed with the abbey church in 1540.

The year the community began is not settled. A manuscript without a name, seen in the eighteenth century, said Egwin started the abbey in 682. That is before he was bishop, and it was judged improbable. Another account says 701, the year the whole peninsula was conferred on him, with building beginning in that year or in 702. The first privilege from Pope Constantine is phrased as written in the 709th year of the incarnation. Egwin is said to have brought that charter back from Rome, and Archbishop Berhtwald is said to have read it at a council of the whole of England held at Alcester. That meeting was probably fictitious. Thomas of Marlborough, who later wrote the history of the house and himself became abbot, says that a community of monks was then established, which is why the foundation is also dated to 709. In his telling, when the day of consecration came Egwin laid aside worldly cares, resigned the bishopric, and became abbot, following the example of humility.

An alleged charter of Egwin, purporting to be from 714, says that on the feast of All Saints he and Bishop Wilfrid consecrated the church he had built, to God, the Blessed Mary, and all Christ’s elect. The feast of All Saints was established in the West after 609 or 610, under Pope Boniface IV, but its keeping on 1 November belongs to the time of Pope Gregory III, who died in 741. The November date and a charter of 714 therefore sit awkwardly together. Bishop Wilfrid in the charter is Egwin’s successor at Worcester, though he is sometimes confused with Wilfrid, bishop of York, who died about 709. It has sometimes been assumed that the consecration fell on All Saints’ Day in 709, which would tie the abbey to All Saints’ Church in the town. The burial of the last great building abbot, Clement Lichfield, under the chantry chapel of that church, now called the Lichfield Chapel, ties the same church to the abbey’s last years.

The Virgin Mary was the figure at the centre of the foundation story. She was a Jewish woman of Nazareth, the wife of Joseph and the mother of Jesus, and by Egwin’s day she had long been venerated in the churches. Matthew and Luke describe her as a virgin who conceived by the Holy Spirit. She was honoured as the Mother of God, as Our Lady, and as queen of heaven, and churches, feasts, images, and pilgrimages already clustered around her. Many visions have been claimed for her across the centuries. Evesham’s is the local one: a swineherd and then a bishop, in a wood inside a river bend, in the first years of the eighth century. The abbey was dedicated to Our Lady of Evesham, to Saint Eoves, and to Saint Egwin. The Blessed Virgin Mary remained the house’s patron, which gave a bitter edge to the verse the monks were singing on the day the monastery was closed.

The pattern of life the monks eventually followed was that of St. Benedict. Benedict of Nursia, born about 480 and died on 21 March 547, was an Italian monk, son of a Roman noble of Nursia, the modern Norcia. He left his studies in Rome, lived first as a hermit in a cave above Subiaco, founded twelve communities nearby, and then moved to Monte Cassino. His Rule, shaped by the writings of John Cassian and close to an older text known as the Rule of the Master, was prized for balance, moderation, and reasonableness. It became the most influential monastic rule in the Latin West. The only substantial ancient portrait of him is in the Dialogues of Pope Gregory I, thought to have been written in 593, a spiritual account drawn from disciples who had lived with him, not a modern biography. The later Order of Saint Benedict is a confederation of independent congregations, not an order of the later centralised kind. In 1964 Pope Paul VI named Benedict a patron of Europe. None of that sixth-century life was lived at Evesham. What Evesham inherited was the Rule, and the habit of a community that prayed, worked, and stayed.

When that inheritance arrived is told in two ways. The abbey is described as Benedictine in origin and is classed with the English Benedictine tradition. A closer account of the site says it was founded as a minster about 701, became a Benedictine abbey in the tenth century, and remained an abbey until 1540. Few great English abbeys lasted so long without a break. Westminster dates from the eleventh century. Tintern and Fountains were not founded until the twelfth. Evesham is also counted among only about twenty-five religious houses already in existence before the reign of King Alfred, which began in 871.

For two centuries after Egwin, most abbots are names and little more. The early ones are said to have kept the original estates broadly intact. Aldmund is placed about 783 or 787. Credan, also spelled Crendan, Creedan, and Credanus, is one of the saints later claimed by the house, and he is remembered as abbot during the reign of King Offa of Mercia, though the abbot list itself records little about him beyond the name. Tintferth belongs around 803. The sequence runs on through men such as Elferd in the middle of the ninth century, and Edwin, whose abbacy is carried to 946. Then the monastic life broke. From 946 to 970 secular canons were installed by Alchelm, described as chieftain of the Hwicce, and after his death various lay rulers occupied the abbey.

Osward, abbot from about 970 until he was expelled in 975, is the man in whose time the old church fell. Byrhtferth says that Egwin’s church of about 700 was still standing then, and that when it collapsed the interior was badly damaged, except for the feretory that held Egwin’s relics. The church was rebuilt in the same style. The first minster had probably been of wood, perhaps using stone taken from that older British church. Saxon monastic plans were not fixed, and without a deep excavation the layout of this early Evesham cannot be recovered. From 975 to about 978 the monks were again turned out. Alferus, or Elfere, called prince of Mercia, replaced them with secular canons. On his deathbed he is said to have repented, restored the lands, and put an abbot back.

Frithegar, from about 978 to about 993 or 996, faced canons who resisted his rule. Earl Godwine obtained the foundation for himself and his heirs. Between about 983 and 993 King Ethelred II made a contradictory grant to Bishop Athelsig, who then lost it and was banished. Between about 993 and 996 the king gave the abbey to Bishop Aethelstan, who died about 995 or 996. It passed briefly to Adulf, bishop of Worcester. Abbot Alfgar, appointed sometime between 997 and 1002, is thought to have died within months. Brithmar, who died in 1013, recovered forty hides from Godwine by paying back the sum Godwine had given for them. When Abbot Agelwy died in 1014, Godwine seized the lands again.

Ælfweard, abbot from 1014 to his death on 27 July 1044, asserted Evesham’s independence from Worcester. He made Prior Æfic rural dean of the Vale of Evesham. Æfic became spiritual guide to Earl Leofric and Lady Godiva, and a friend of Cnut, king of Denmark. Ælfweard worked to raise the house’s standing. He entreated Cnut for the relics of Wigstan of Mercia, also called Wystan and Wulstan, and he bought the relics of Odulf, a Frisian missionary who had died in 855. The translation of Egwin himself is dated, in a later note written in the house, to the fourth ides of September 1039, which is 10 September, and the same note dates Egwin’s death to the third kalends of January 717. The pre-Conquest abbey, as it stood before 1066, held the abbey church with its crypt, a church of the Holy Trinity given by Leofric and Godiva and built between about 1017 and 1037, and a chapel of St Nicholas. Where the Holy Trinity church stood is not known. Between 1054 and 1055 the Benedictine abbey was reconsecrated and a shrine of the canonised Egwin was set up.

Mannig, a monk of Evesham, was consecrated abbot on 10 August 1044. Paralysis struck him, and a monk named Æthelwig administered the estates. Mannig resigned in 1058 and died on 5 January 1065. Æthelwig was consecrated on 23 April 1058. He was the last Saxon abbot. He had been a favoured counsellor of Edward the Confessor and then of King Harold. He increased the estates. The monks grew from twelve to about thirty-six. In 1074 he ordered a northern mission to restore the monasteries of Durham, York, and Whitby. He decided to replace the Anglo-Saxon minster and left five chests of silver for a new church he had planned. He died on 16 February 1077. The monastic history says the house came through the Norman Conquest unusually well because Æthelwig made a quick approach to the new king.

That king was William the Conqueror. Born about 1028, he was the son of Duke Robert I of Normandy and Herleva, and he was duke of Normandy from 1035. In 1066, after Edward the Confessor died, he led a Franco-Norman army against Harold Godwinson and killed him at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October. He was crowned king on Christmas Day 1066. The years that followed were spent putting down English revolts, planting a Norman nobility, and filling bishoprics and abbeys with his own men. In 1086 he ordered the survey later called Domesday Book. He died in September 1087 on campaign in northern France and was buried at Caen. His hold on England was the world in which Evesham either kept its lands or lost them. The abbey’s own story is that Æthelwig’s speed saved it.

Walter, a monk of Cerisy, was appointed in May 1077 by William the Conqueror. He was the first Norman abbot. The abbot list ends his rule at his death on 20 January 1086. One account of the building stretches the same work to 1104, and the six main building periods name him as the man who, between 1077 and 1086, rebuilt the abbey in the Norman manner. He planted a vineyard at Hampton. He did not have an empty site. The precinct already held a group of pre-Conquest churches: the abbey church with its crypt, a church of St Mary the Virgin that may have been the same building, the church of the Holy Trinity, and the chapel of St Nicholas. At least one of them had to stay in use until the presbytery and the liturgical choir of the new church were ready. Walter pulled the old buildings down in phases as he replaced them. The Anglo-Saxon crypt was later filled with rubble from the old church above it. His new east arm, with a crypt of its own, rose separately, so the monks could move their services without a break.

His church is described as an enhanced version of Lanfranc’s churches at Caen and Canterbury: a longer and wider east arm, with columnar piers and an extensive crypt like that of St Augustine’s at Canterbury, and a wider nave. The length of the nave matches Lanfranc’s church of St Stephen at Caen. Walter was the only post-Conquest abbot of Evesham with a personal link to that church, so the nave length was presumably fixed in his time, even if the nave itself was finished later. There may have been galleries over the aisles of the east arm. Those may be the upper parts of the church, near the high altar, from which a servant fell in the early twelfth century. By 1104 the tower had risen high enough to meet the roofs of the east arm and the transepts and to hold some bells. When the money ran out, Walter sent Egwin’s relics on a tour of England to draw fresh gifts, and with them he finished the work east of the projected nave.

Under Abbot Robert, from about 1086 to his death on 9 September 1096, a monk of Jumièges, the household was large: sixty-seven monks, three paupers maintained by command, five nuns, three clerks, and sixty-five servants. He sent a mission to Denmark to found a monastery at Odense. Maurice, a monk of Evesham, followed him until about 1121. A Robert II is sometimes inserted between Maurice and the next abbot, and sometimes left out of the chronicle, perhaps lost in legal business with the papacy. Reginald Foliot, a monk from Gloucester, was abbot from 1130 to 1149. He is thought to have obtained from the pope the right to the mitre and to other pontifical vestments: gloves, ring, dalmatic, tunic, and sandals. The gateway and wall that bear his name are dated about 1120, earlier than the start given for his abbacy, so the two dates do not sit neatly together. Little further work was done on the church before he arrived. Building had stopped at the crossing and the transepts by 1104, and the nave was apparently not begun until 1130 or later, so the three openings from the crossing into the future nave must have been blocked, unless part of the Anglo-Saxon church still covered them. Reginald built the greater part of the nave walls. He also walled the whole of the abbey and the graveyard.

The precinct those walls enclosed can still be traced from nineteenth-century property lines. It was a squarish block bounded by the Market Place, Vine Street, Little Abbey Lane, and the Upper Abbey Park. Before 1066 the boundary was a high thorn hedge. A wall replaced the hedge in the twelfth century, and later the wall was carried east and west to the river bank. The precinct had two parts. On the north was the graveyard, which is still in use. On the south were the church, the cloister, the courtyard, and the other buildings. That southern ground is no longer a working church. Pershore and Gloucester, also Anglo-Saxon foundations, still are. At Evesham the archaeology of the whole precinct can be studied without interrupting a living cathedral or abbey church. A few modern buildings have encroached on the courtyard, but the damage has been limited.

William de Andeville, prior of Dover, was abbot from 1149 until his death on 4 January 1159. He attacked and razed the Beauchamp castle at Bengeworth, a sign of how hard the abbey was willing to strike at a neighbour’s fortification. His successor, Roger, a monk of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, died on 4 January 1160. Adam de Senlis, a Cluniac from La Charité-sur-Loire and prior of Bermondsey, ruled from 1161 to his death in 1189. He established the abbey’s independent jurisdiction. It became a mitred abbey and sat in parliament. In its heyday it was one of the wealthiest abbeys in the country. He finished the cloisters and the nave and gave the church many glass windows. The west front is presumed to be his. In 1183 he translated Egwin’s relics to a new feretory, in the presence of five neighbouring abbots and the prior of Worcester. King Henry II came to the abbey at least three times. Less noisily, and over the whole of its life, the monks produced manuscripts and other writing, kept a school for local boys, gave alms, and from this square of ground managed estates and churches across the countryside.

Roger Norreys, also called Norreis, became abbot in 1190 against the convent’s wish. He had been prior of Christ Church. He is remembered as the bad abbot of Evesham. Between 1204 and 1206 the case of Evesham, heard in the Roman curia, confirmed the abbey’s independence from the bishop of Worcester. Norreys built a tower that was finished about 1201. In 1210, when the church had only just been completed, part of that tower fell onto the east arm. A similar collapse followed in 1229. On 22 November 1213 he was deposed and sent down to be prior of the dependent cell at Penwortham in Lancashire. The two parish churches beside the abbey, St Lawrence and All Saints, seem to have been founded soon after the abbey church was finished. St Lawrence was in use by about 1197 and has no earlier fabric. The oldest datable feature of All Saints is the original west doorway, of about 1200 or perhaps about 1180. St Lawrence is also spelled Laurence.

Randulf, prior of Worcester, was consecrated abbot on 9 March 1214 and died on 17 December 1229. In 1215 he issued the Institutes of Evesham Abbey. With him, and then under Thomas of Marlborough, the church was repaired and enriched after the collapses. Thomas, a monk of the house, had been sacrist in 1217 and prior in 1218. He was consecrated abbot on 12 July 1230 and died on 12 September 1236. He altered the east arm to give the presbytery an ambulatory, which it had not had. The Romanesque church up to that point seems to have been planned with three apses, and the apse of the north transept has shown up in excavation. Bases were built for the reliquaries of Egwin and of Wigstan. Towers were added to the presbytery after 1218. Richard le Gras, prior of Hurley in Berkshire, was abbot from 1236 to his death on 9 December 1242. In 1239 the church was dedicated according to the Constitution of London. In 1241 he was lord chancellor of England. Thomas of Gloucester, who died on 15 December 1255, was buried in the middle of the church. Henry of Worcester, installed on St Egwin’s Day in 1256, died on 13 November 1263 and was buried in the body of the church. From that day until September 1266 the abbey had no abbot.

The vacancy covered the Battle of Evesham. Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester, was born about 1208 and died on 4 August 1265. He was a younger son of Simon de Montfort, the French lord who led a crusade against the Cathars and was killed at the siege of Toulouse in 1218, and of Alix de Montmorency. The English earldom of Leicester came through his grandmother. After the loss of Normandy, King John would not let the elder Simon succeed, and the estates sat with the earl of Chester. In 1229 the younger Simon gave up his French rights, his elder brother Amaury gave up the English claim, and Simon came to England. He spoke no English. Henry III, well disposed to French-speaking foreigners at court, did not oppose him. Formal investiture as earl waited until February 1239, though Simon had already used the title. As earl of Leicester he expelled the Jews from that city. For a little more than a year he was the effective ruler of England. In that time he cancelled debts owed to Jews by seizing the records, and his party massacred Jews in London, Worcester, and Derby, and killed scores more from Winchester to Lincoln.

He had reached that power by leading the barons against Henry III in the Second Barons’ War. At the Battle of Lewes in 1264 he defeated the king and took into his custody Henry, Prince Edward, and the king’s brother Richard of Cornwall. The parliament of Oxford had already cut back Henry’s unlimited authority. A later parliament of Montfort’s included ordinary citizens from the towns as well as knights of the shires. For that reason he is remembered as one of the progenitors of parliamentary representation in England. His position then shrank. In February 1265 Robert de Ferrers, earl of Derby, was imprisoned in the Tower. In May Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, deserted to the king and helped Prince Edward escape. The lords of the Welsh Marches rose. Montfort sought the help of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Wales, and paid for it by recognising Llywelyn’s title and his conquests, which cost Montfort support at home. Edward took Gloucester on 29 June. Montfort needed to join his son, Simon the Younger, who was moving too slowly from London. The younger Simon reached Kenilworth, where Edward caught many of his men quartered outside the castle. On 4 August Edward came south carrying banners taken at Kenilworth, so that the father would think the reinforcements had arrived. He blocked the only bridge and shut the older Simon inside the loop of the Avon.

The royalists had learned from Lewes to take the high ground. On the ridge called Green Hill, just north of the town, Edward drew up on the left and Gloucester on the right. At about eight in the morning Montfort left the town as a thunderstorm broke. At Lewes the barons had worn white crosses. At Evesham the royal army wore a red cross. Montfort is said to have remarked that they had not learned that for themselves, but had been taught it by him. Seeing the skill of the advance, he is also said to have told his companions that their bodies belonged to the enemy and their souls to God. The armies are estimated at about five thousand on his side and about ten thousand on the king’s. He threw his strength at the centre, hoping to split the line. The push worked at first. The Welsh infantry deserted early. The royal flanks closed, and the fight became a massacre. It was called the murder of Evesham, for battle it was none. The royalists, still bitter from Lewes, killed men who tried to surrender instead of ransoming them, which had been the usual custom. The bloodshed among nobles was described as without precedent since the Conquest. Henry de Montfort was killed first. Simon lost his horse and died fighting. His body was mutilated: head, hands, feet, and testicles were cut off. King Henry, dressed in Montfort’s colours and still a prisoner in the baronial ranks, was barely saved by Roger de Leybourne, a former rebel.

Simon had made his preparations for the battle from the abbey, and he was buried immediately afterwards. One account places the grave near the high altar. Another says the remains, such as they were, were laid at the foot of the altar. Henry de Montfort was buried here too, and so were Hugh le Despenser, the first Baron le Despenser, Robert de Stafford, and, in his own time, Thomas of Marlborough. In September 1265 a parliament at Winchester disinherited those who had fought for the barons. Scattered resistance continued. The garrison of Kenilworth held out through a siege in 1266. At the end of October the Dictum of Kenilworth let rebels buy back their lands at a price set by how deeply they had been involved. The garrison refused at first, then accepted in 1267. Wide baronial opposition in Henry’s reign was over. The abbey, which had no abbot through the whole of this crisis, kept the body of the man who had ruled England and died on the hill above the town.

A monument was set up in the abbey park in 1965, on the seven-hundredth anniversary. The stone was brought from Montfort-l’Amaury in France, named as his birthplace. The inscription calls him earl of Leicester and a pioneer of representative government, killed in the Battle of Evesham on 4 August 1265. It says that here his remains were buried. The Speaker of the House of Commons unveiled it, and the archbishop of Canterbury dedicated it, on 18 July 1965. It is described as an altar-like memorial. William of Whitechurch, a monk of Pershore and formerly abbot of Alcester, became abbot of Evesham in 1266, the year after the battle, and died on 3 August 1282.

The church was not finished with the battle. In 1261 lightning had already set fire to the top of the tower. A lady chapel was added between 1275 and 1295. John of Brockhampton, abbot from 1282 to his death on 18 August 1316, and previously cellarer, built the chapter house and secured the right of the prior and convent to have custody of the house during vacancies. William de Chyryton, elected on 30 August 1316 and confirmed on 6 February 1317, died on 13 December 1344. He built the great gateway and completed the boundary wall. The upper part of the east arm was rebuilt between 1395 and 1418, under John of Ombersley, who also rebuilt the main span of the town bridge and in 1405 arranged for the town to be paved. In 1381 that same abbot successfully resisted a claim by the archbishop of Canterbury to visit the house. In 1466, under Richard Pembroke, the monastery of Alcester was united with Evesham. At the dissolution the abbey church still stood as a fine Romanesque building. There had been no further significant change to its main form.

Clement Lichfield, a monk and former prior of the house, was elected abbot on 28 December 1514. One building account starts his work in 1513. He built the new bell tower, added to the two parish churches, and embellished the abbey further. He signed the round robin in which six bishops and twenty-one other abbots told the pope that Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon had to be granted. He resigned on or before 17 March 1538, reckoned in the old style. He died on 9 October 1546 and was buried in his chantry in All Saints’ Church. Philip Hawford, also called Ballard, a monk and former cellarer, was the last abbot, from 1539 to 1540. On 28 October 1538, with Hugh Latimer of Worcester, he broke the shrine of the Holy Blood at Hailes. He surrendered Evesham on 17 November 1539. He later asked Thomas Cromwell, without success, for a college to replace the abbey. He became rector of Elmley Lovett and, in 1553, dean of Worcester. He died on 30 July 1557 and was buried in Worcester Cathedral.

The day of the suppression is given twice. A monk of the house, John of Alcester, wrote in the margin of a Bible that in 1539, the thirty-first year of Henry VIII, on 30 January, at evensong, the monastery was suppressed. The convent was in the choir at the verse Deposuit potentes, “He hath put down the mighty,” and was not allowed to finish. Philip Ballard was abbot, and thirty-five religious were alive that day. The abbot list places the same scene at vespers on Friday 30 January 1540, after the surrender of 17 November 1539. The two January dates are both on record. The verse is from the Magnificat, the song of Mary. The house had been dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and it had been founded on a vision of her. Another account puts the king’s officers in the church, stopping the monks in the middle of the service, in 1540, and carries the life of the abbey down to that year.

The land, the property, and the lordship passed to the crown. In 1542 letters patent gave Sir Philip Hoby, named in the grant as Hobby, the house and site of the dissolved monastery, the houses within the precinct, and the demesne lands in Evesham. The crown kept a number of properties, and it kept all the bells and lead of the church and belfry. The six abbey bells were taken, and five of the bells in the bell tower with them. By October 1540 the demolition was well under way. Hoby, trying to buy stone, said the best part was already sold, and he wrote of the waste and spoil. He paid men to watch at night against disorder. People of the town who claimed a share in the plunder are said to have made no little spoil. Some stone was sold. Much of it went into other buildings of the time, and sculptures from the abbey later turned up at Abbey Manor House. In 1554, under Queen Mary I, the one great bell still in the clock house, estimated at thirty hundredweight, was granted to the town, and the bell tower with it. The gift is read as part of Mary’s attempt to restore Catholicism. There was probably little left of the abbey church by then.

The ruins became a subject for travellers in the later eighteenth century. Prints of them appeared in Francis Grose’s antiquities of England and Wales in 1786, and in Samuel Ireland’s views of the upper Avon in 1795. In 1793 J. M. W. Turner drew the old abbey gateway in pen and wash, and he drew the church of St Laurence seen through the arch of the bell tower. An anonymous artist of the same period painted the tower and the churches from the river. In 1878 a new clock and carillon, by Gillett, Bland and Company of Croydon, were installed in the tower. The hours struck on a bell of thirty-six long hundredweight. Westminster chimes used four other bells. The dials were ten feet across. The escapement was the double three-legged gravity escapement of Edmund Beckett, and the pendulum was made of zinc and iron tubes so that heat would not throw the time off. The machinery weighed more than a ton. A tune played every three hours, day and night, and the tune changed with the day of the week. The hammers could be lifted clear so the bells could be rung by hand, and there was a keyboard. The cost was about two thousand pounds.

The ground itself was opened in the nineteenth century by Edward Rudge, who owned it. In 1811 he began on the chapter house. Between 1812 and 1815 the work uncovered most of the crypt under the east arm, and the east side of the north transept and the crossing. His son, Edward John Rudge, measured the remains and drew the plan as the digging went on. In 1817 they finished the south side of the crypt and the east wall of the south transept, exposed the crypt of a small rectangular building in the angle between the east arm and the south transept, and uncovered the east wall of the east cloister range between the church and the chapter house. The nave had been cut into four gardens by walls built after the dissolution. Each garden was dug and then filled in once the walls had been measured. The second garden from the west was dug in 1821, the third and fourth in 1822, and the westernmost in 1822 and 1823. The transept digging was probably finished in 1824. By 1830 they were on the east cloister range again, and between 1832 and 1834 they explored more of that range and most of a garden on the north side of the bell tower. The results went to the society of antiquaries in London. A memoir by the son, with illustrations by Anne Rudge, was published afterwards.

The digging was also a destruction. Once the plan of the church and chapter house had been made, a considerable part of those foundations was taken up and removed. Soon afterwards a Mr Welch, who owned the cloister ground, dug the whole of it over. He kept no plan. The foundations were broken up and burned on the spot for lime. In 1881 the surviving piece of the north-west crossing pier, and the respond where the transept’s west wall met it, were dug out again. The diggers hoped to find the base complete and the lower parts of the columns still in place. There was little left. The cutting was kept inside a retaining wall and an iron fence. In 1958 the Vale of Evesham Historical Society, under T. J. S. Bayliss, re-excavated what seemed to be part of the east wall of the small crypt near the transepts, apparently of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, in the Upper Abbey Park between April and July. An evaluation followed in 1988, a limited radar survey of the eastern end of the church in 1989, a survey of standing structures and an excavation in 1990, and a more systematic geophysical survey of the eastern church and the chapter house in 1994. Limited trenches in the precinct and at the almonry showed that extensive medieval deposits, and deposits from after the dissolution, still survive, and parts of the precinct walls were surveyed in detail.

Those nineteenth-century trenches did not go below the post-Conquest remains. Under them, the precinct is a rare accessible site of an Anglo-Saxon monastery and of the buildings that belonged to it. Very little is known about how so early a monastery was laid out, and the levels below may still hold that plan. Romano-British remains are believed to lie deeper still, and they are little understood. The later, documented history also happened inside the same square: the royal visits, the fall of Norreys, Montfort’s preparations and his burial, and the afternoon or evening when the service was stopped. The archaeology of the church and of the whole precinct is of national interest. Very few great abbeys, Glastonbury among them, offer that combination of access and importance. Evesham is not only a local ruin.

A housing excavation in the town, reported in July 2022, changed the map of medieval Evesham without yet proving a new plan of the abbey. Ironwork suggested complicated manufacture. A bone spindle-whorl, green-glazed pottery of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, and cooking vessels came out of the ground. Human remains were found in a medieval fish pond. They are not thought to have been buried there on purpose. They were more likely moved when the pond was filled in, sometime between the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries. The council’s archaeology adviser, Aidan Smyth, said the settlement reached farther than the old boundary, and that the quality of the buildings suggested wealthy occupants, perhaps merchants or people high in the church. The buildings might have had some connection with the abbey, or the site might have been an industrial one, suited to manufacture because it lay by the river and apart from where most people lived. He called these theories, and said the analysis was still going on. The finds belong to the town the abbey dominated. They are not yet a new plan of the church.

The freehold of much of the abbey site stayed with the Rudge family, who had held it for about four centuries, until May 2017, when they gave it to the Evesham Abbey Trust. Accounts of the trust’s beginning differ: it is said to have been set up in 2015, registered as a charity in 2016, and registered as a charity in 2017. Its aim is to conserve the site and its surroundings. In 2019 it obtained more than a million pounds from national and local funders to repair the walls and make interpretive gardens. The work is also described as an eight-year project whose final cost was about £1.3 million, against a contract figure of just over £1.1 million. The historic walls and the cloister arch were made safe. The cloister was planted with trellises and climbing plants to show where the walls had stood. Four themed gardens were woven through with architectural fragments found on the site. More than a hundred volunteers gave more than eight thousand hours over five years. The project worked with more than forty local schools. On 22 April 2023 the place reopened to the public. The cloister and the area of the nave, closed for about four hundred years, were opened again. More than six hundred people came over that weekend. The chairman, Barrie Baldelli, said a new generation would have to learn the site and keep it.

A tithe barn at Middle Littleton belongs to the same monastic countryside, as a building tied to the abbey’s estates rather than to the church in the park. The abbey’s own change was larger than any one barn or tower. For more than eight centuries it was the reason the town was there. It kept the shrine of a Mercian bishop and the bones of other saints, taught boys, fed the poor, and ran a wide estate. It fought the bishop of Worcester and won a jurisdiction of its own. It took in the mutilated body of Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester, and so became a place where the baronial war, and the parliament that had included townsmen, were remembered. Henry VIII’s suppression scattered its stone through the town and left the bell tower as the town’s clock house. Because the church was not rebuilt for a later parish, the ground under the park still holds the first monastery. The gardens opened in 2023 do not restore that church. They make its footprint readable again, in the bend of the river where Eof said the women sang.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/evesham-abbey