Malmesbury Abbey

Malmesbury Abbey stands on a hill above the little town of Malmesbury in Wiltshire. It is a former Benedictine monastery dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and it is one of the few English religious houses with a continuous history from the seventh century through to the closure of the monasteries. The church that visitors enter today is the surviving part of a much larger Norman building. Less than half of that church still stands.

The south porch, richly carved in the Romanesque manner, is the way in from the churchyard, and a room over that porch, a parvise, still keeps a few books from the old abbey library. A watching loft projects into the nave. Beyond a blank wall above the altar, the ruined eastern arm is gone. The church is recorded at grid reference ST 93280 87320 on the Ordnance Survey National Grid, the lettered system that fixes a place in Great Britain by its distance east and north from an origin to the west of the Isles of Scilly.

The dedication names two men of the first Christian generation. Saint Peter, born Simon, was a fisherman and one of the Twelve, later called the rock, and tradition makes him a leader of the church in Rome who was crucified under Nero. Paul the Apostle, also called Saint Paul, was Saul of Tarsus. He was not one of the Twelve.

After a vision on the road to Damascus he travelled and wrote letters that shaped Christian worship in the West. The abbey’s later life belongs to the Church of England, in the Diocese of Bristol, the archdeaconry of Malmesbury, and the parish of Malmesbury and Brokenborough. The clergy list names the Right Rev. Vivienne Faull as bishop.

That style, Right Rev., is a form used for bishops. Vivienne Faull, born on 20 May 1955, was Bishop of Bristol from 2018 until she retired on 1 September 2025. She had been the first woman appointed chaplain of an Oxford or Cambridge college, the only woman to serve as a cathedral provost, and she was consecrated on 3 July 2018 at St Paul’s Cathedral in London before her installation at Bristol. The vicar named for the abbey church is Oliver Ross.

In 2022 he called the building a jewel and said that the repairs then needed would cost £3.5 million.

The monastic story is set against a longer Christian history in England that runs from Augustine’s mission in 597 to the reign of Henry VIII. At Malmesbury itself the earliest account is uncertain. One version speaks of a nunnery about 603. Another calls 637 the more likely date, when an Irish monk, Maeldulph, established a hermitage on the hill.

The man is also called Máel Dub, Maildubh, and Maildulf. His Gaelic name means a dark disciple, or a disciple of Dub. He taught local children, among them Aldhelm and Daniel of Winchester, and he lived in a British stronghold known as Bladon, or Bladow. The place took his name.

Bede wrote of the monastery which they call the monastery of Máel Dub, and later spellings moved from Mailduberi and Maldubesburg toward Malmesbury. A later charter has been read as giving his name as Máel Duin. Toward the end of his life the area was conquered by the Saxons. His death is placed in 673 in the list of the heads of the house, and around 675 in other accounts.

He was buried in the church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. His shrine did not last. In the eleventh century the Norman abbot Warin of Lyre cast his bones out and put them in a far corner of St Michael’s church.

Aldhelm is the founder in the usual telling, and the first abbot. He was born before the middle of the seventh century, about 639, and he died on 25 May 709, the day kept as his feast. He is called a nephew of King Ine of Wessex, and he is also called the son of Kenten, of the royal house of Wessex. An early biographer, Faritius, made him Ine’s brother, and that claim is rejected.

He was educated first in Máel Dub’s school on the hill. In 668 Pope Vitalian sent Theodore of Tarsus to be archbishop of Canterbury, and the North African scholar Hadrian became abbot of St Augustine’s there. Aldhelm studied under Hadrian. He addressed him as the venerable preceptor of his rude childhood, though he was already about thirty when those studies began.

They included Roman law, astronomy, astrology, reckoning, and the difficulty of the calendar. Early lives say he learned Greek and Hebrew. That is doubtful, but his Latin is full of Greek words turned into Latin. Ill health took him away from Canterbury.

He returned to Malmesbury and lived as a monk under Máel Dub for fourteen years, probably from 661, a span that includes the Canterbury years.

When Máel Dub died, Aldhelm was appointed to lead the community. The year 675 is given, on the strength of a charter of doubtful authenticity that William of Malmesbury later cited, and the appointment is ascribed to Leuthere, bishop of Winchester. Another account places the establishment of the monastery sometime between 675 and 705, under Aldhelm’s abbacy, and says the early dedication is not known for sure. A further account says the house was founded as a Benedictine monastery around 676.

Aldhelm is said to have introduced the Benedictine rule, secured the monks’ right to elect their abbot, and replaced Máel Dub’s modest building with a new church. He also obtained lands for the house. The same man founded, or is credited with, further centres of learning at Frome in Somerset and at Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire. He built a church at Frome about 685.

In 701, after a pilgrimage to Rome, Pope Sergius I allowed him by a bull to establish the monastery there. The Anglo-Saxon church of St Laurence at Bradford-on-Avon is regarded as his. He remained abbot until about 705, when he became the first bishop of Sherborne, and even then the monks persuaded him to keep the direction of Malmesbury until his death.

The political world around that promotion was the kingdom of Wessex under Ine. Ine, whose name is also given as Ini or Ina, came to the throne after Cædwalla abdicated in 688 and went to Rome to be baptised. The regnal list gives Ine thirty-seven years and an abdication in 726, which would put his accession in 689, so there may have been an unsettled interval, and his father Cenred may still have been reigning beside him for a time. Around 694 Ine issued a code of laws, the first by an Anglo-Saxon king outside Kent.

They survive because Alfred the Great appended them to his own code, and Alfred said he had set aside earlier laws he disliked, so the text may not be the seventh-century code in full. The laws assume a Christian king. They fine failures of baptism and of tithe, they treat the oath of a communicant as weightier than that of a non-Christian, and they distinguish Ine’s English and British subjects, with the weregild of Britons set at half that of Saxons of the same rank. They also give the earliest documentary picture of open-field farming in Wessex, and they use the word Englisc for Ine’s Germanic people.

Ine had opposed the division of the diocese of Winchester. When Bishop Hædde died, he accepted it, and Sherborne became the new see about 705, with Aldhelm as its first bishop. At Aldhelm’s suggestion in that year, Ine built the church that later became Wells Cathedral, and the chronicle records that he built a minster at Glastonbury, meaning further work on a British monastery already there. He patronised the new diocese, and he abdicated in 726.

Aldhelm’s public work reached beyond Wessex into the old British church of the south-west. A synod in Wessex sent him to remonstrate with the Britons of Dumnonia, that is Devon and Cornwall, over the date of Easter and over the tonsure. Those customs were part of what is called Celtic Christianity. He wrote a long and sharp letter to King Geraint, and agreement with Rome is said to have followed.

He also went himself into Devon and Cornwall, a journey he recounts in the Carmen Rhythmicum. The argument was about whether British and Saxon Christians would keep one calendar and one communion. Malmesbury’s first great scholar was therefore not only a builder of monasteries. He was an agent in the long argument over how the western peoples of Britain would sit inside a Roman Easter.

There is a second disagreement about when the house became Benedictine. One account has Aldhelm introduce the rule in the 670s. Another says that by the tenth century, between 965 and 974, the monastery had become established as a house of that order. Both can be repeated without a verdict: an early adoption under the first abbot, and a firm establishment as a Benedictine community in the generation of the tenth-century reform.

What is not in dispute is the house’s later fame for learning. The names tied to that fame include Aldhelm himself, John Scotus Eriugena, Alfred of Malmesbury, and Ælfric of Eynsham. Alfred of Malmesbury is recorded as dying in 999. Ælfric of Crediton, abbot from 974 to 1010, is remembered for building work and for a prophecy that Vikings would sack Malmesbury.

The town, meanwhile, had grown up around the expanding abbey. Under Alfred the Great it was made a burh, assessed at twelve hides.

That burh belongs to the defensive world Alfred built after the Great Heathen Army. Viking attacks through the ninth century culminated in the invasion of 865. By 878 the Vikings had overrun East Anglia, Northumbria, and Mercia, and had nearly taken Wessex. Alfred’s victory at Edington, and his agreement with Guthrum, left western Mercia with the Anglo-Saxons and eastern Mercia with the Vikings.

In the 890s Alfred, his son Edward, and Æthelred, lord of the Mercians, fought off renewed attacks. Alfred is also said to have honoured his young grandson Æthelstan with a scarlet cloak, a belt set with gems, and a sword in a gilded scabbard. Some historians read that ceremony as marking the boy for the succession while Alfred’s nephew Æthelwold was a threat. Others place it in a quarrel between Alfred and Edward, or even as a sign that the old king favoured the grandson over the son.

An acrostic poem in praise of a prince Adalstan has been read as a prophecy for the same child.

Æthelstan, or Athelstan, was born about 894. He was the son of Edward the Elder and of Ecgwynn, Edward’s first consort, about whom no contemporary source gives a name or a sure rank. Later writers called her ignoble, or noble. He was about thirty when Edward died on 17 July 924 at Farndon in northern Mercia.

The Mercians accepted Æthelstan. His half-brother Ælfweard may have been recognised in Wessex, but Ælfweard died sixteen days after their father. Æthelstan was not crowned until September 925, and Winchester in particular resisted him. Ælfweard was buried there.

Bishop Frithestan of Winchester did not attend the coronation and witnessed no known charter of Æthelstan until 928. According to William of Malmesbury, a nobleman called Alfred plotted to blind Æthelstan on the ground that he was illegitimate. Blinding would have kept him from kingship without the blame attached to killing. In 933 another half-brother, Edwin, drowned in a shipwreck in the North Sea.

Some later writers said Æthelstan ordered the drowning. Most historians set that charge aside. Edwin’s death may have ended Winchester’s open opposition.

From 924 to 927 Æthelstan was king of the Anglo-Saxons. In 927 he took the last Viking kingdom, York, after the death of his brother-in-law Sihtric, and he became king of the English, the first Anglo-Saxon ruler of the whole of England. He never married and he had no children. Some historians think he agreed not to have heirs so that Wessex would accept him.

Sarah Foot, whose biography of him appeared in 2011, reads the choice as a religious determination to live in chastity. Welsh kings attended his court. In 934 he invaded Scotland and forced Constantine II to submit. The reasons given for that campaign differ: the removal of Edwin as a rival, the death of Guthfrith of Dublin, a quarrel over Bamburgh, or a broken treaty.

His army reached Dunnottar, and his fleet raided Caithness. In 937 Olaf Guthfrithson of Dublin, Constantine, and Owain of Strathclyde invaded late in the year. Æthelstan defeated them at the Battle of Brunanburh. The victory gave him prestige in Britain and on the Continent.

It did not last in the north. After he died, Vikings took York back, and it was not finally recovered until 954. He was succeeded by his half-brother Edmund.

Æthelstan died at Gloucester on 27 October 939, aged about forty-five. His grandfather Alfred, his father Edward, and his half-brother Ælfweard had been buried at Winchester. He would not honour the city that had opposed him. By his own wish he was buried at Malmesbury, where he had already buried cousins who died at Brunanburh.

No other member of the West Saxon royal family was buried there. William of Malmesbury wrote that the choice reflected devotion to the abbey and to the memory of Aldhelm. Another reading of the same choice, of Malmesbury over the New Minster at Winchester, is that the king remained an outsider to the West Saxon court. The burial itself is placed in 939 and also in 941, a year after the death at Gloucester.

William wrote that he had seen the remains, and that the hair was fair and beautifully intertwined with gold threads. He also wrote that the body was taken up in the eleventh century and reburied in the abbot’s garden, now Abbey House Gardens, to avoid Norman desecration. The bones were later lost. An empty fifteenth-century tomb in the north aisle commemorates him.

A mint at the abbey is said to have been founded around the time of that burial. The sons of Æthelweard, who was himself a son of Alfred, Æthelwine and Ælfwine, are also named among those buried at the abbey, as is Daniel, bishop of Winchester.

The house in the early eleventh century also produced a strange experiment. Eilmer of Malmesbury, called Elmer, Æthelmær, and, by a later miscopying, Oliver, was a Benedictine monk who wrote on astrology. Everything known of him comes from William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum, written about 1125. William was a monk of the same house and almost certainly heard the story from people who had known Eilmer as an old man.

In his youth Eilmer had read the tale of Daedalus and believed it. He fastened wings to his hands and feet and launched himself from a tower. William says he flew for more than a furlong, which is 220 yards, about 201 metres, before the wind and the swirl of air, and his own sense of the rashness of the attempt, brought him down. He broke both legs and was lame ever after.

He used to say that he had failed because he forgot to give himself a tail. Another statement of the distance says he flew over 200 yards, about 182 metres. Both figures are in circulation. The abbey of his day was probably smaller than the church that stands now, though the tower may have been close to the present height, so the exact path is unknown.

Oliver’s Lane, off the High Street and about 200 metres from the abbey, is locally reputed to be the landing place. Another study argues that he is more likely to have come down the steep hill to the south-west than to have crossed the town to the south. He could not have soared. A tail might have let him glide.

Nothing of his own writing on the flight survives, though astrological treatises under his name were still circulating in the sixteenth century.

Eilmer was an old man in 1066, when a comet appeared. He is reported to have said: you have come, you source of tears to many mothers; it is long since I saw you, but as I see you now you are much more terrible, for I see you brandishing the downfall of my country. William recorded the words to show a prophecy fulfilled when the Normans invaded, not to fix Eilmer’s age. If the earlier comet was the one of 989, Eilmer might have been born about 984 and been a small child when he first saw it.

The regularity of comets was probably unknown to him, and he may have meant a different, later comet. The flight, made in his youth, is placed in the early eleventh century, perhaps in its first decade. A stained-glass window of him was installed in the abbey in 1920. The story was retold for centuries, by Helinand of Froidmont, Vincent of Beauvais, Roger Bacon, Ranulf Higden, who was the first to misname him Oliver, and later by John Wilkins, John Milton, and others.

It kept the idea of a man-made flight alive long before anyone could sustain one.

The abbots of the century before the Norman conquest are a mixed record. Ælfric of Crediton’s prophecy of a Viking sack has already been noted. Later heads include men of whom almost nothing is known, and at least one scandal. Beorhtwold II, who died in 1053, is described as a man of bad character who collapsed and died during a drunken orgy in the town.

Beorhtric, appointed in 1053, was removed in 1067 by William the Conqueror. William put in Turold of Fécamp, then in 1070 moved Turold to Peterborough. Warin of Lyre followed, from 1070 until 1087. He spent much of his time at court and squandered the abbey’s resources, and he was the abbot who threw out the bones of Máel Dub.

The conquest was not only a change of kings. It was a change in who held the shrine and whose dead were allowed to remain in honour.

William the Conqueror’s vow after Hastings belongs to the same years, and it produced another Benedictine house, Battle Abbey, in Sussex. He had promised a monastery if he won. In 1070 Pope Alexander II ordered the Normans to do penance for the killing done in the conquest. The abbey was begun on the battlefield, with the high altar on the spot where King Harold was said to have fallen on Saturday 14 October 1066.

William died before it was finished. The church was completed about 1094 and consecrated under his son William II, who presented his father’s sword and coronation robes there. The first monks came from Marmoutier. The house was dedicated to the Holy Trinity, St Mary, and St Martin of Tours, and it was planned for one hundred and forty monks, though no more than sixty lived there at one time.

William I had placed the church of St Martin of Battle outside episcopal jurisdiction, on a level with Canterbury. The abbot was mitred, sat in Parliament, and had the peculiar right to pardon a criminal he met on the way to execution. During the reign of Henry II, Canterbury and Chichester tested the charter and failed. The Roll of Battle Abbey, a list of those who came with William from Normandy, was kept there, and later ages added names that were not authentic.

None of this makes Battle Abbey a daughter of Malmesbury. It shows the same conqueror founding a new house of penance while his officers were replacing the English heads of an old one.

Domesday Book, in 1086, shows what Malmesbury still held. In Wiltshire the abbey had Highway at eleven hides, Dauntsey at ten, Somerford Keynes at five, Brinkworth at five, Norton near Malmesbury at five, Brokenborough with Corston at fifty, Kemble at thirty, though Kemble is now in Gloucestershire, Long Newnton at thirty, Charlton at twenty, Garsdon at three, Crudwell at forty, Bremhill at thirty-eight, and Purton at thirty-five. In Gloucestershire it had Littleton-upon-Severn at five hides, and in Warwickshire Newbold Pacey at three. The lands were valued at £188 and 14 shillings, and they were assessed as three knights’ fees.

By the time of the suppression the abbey owned 23,000 acres, about ninety-three square kilometres, in the twenty parishes of Malmesbury Hundred. The estate was the stake. A house that could put knights in the field and collect the rents of dozens of hides was a lordship as well as a school and a shrine.

The church that partly survives was begun under Bishop Roger of Salisbury, who held the abbey from 1118 to 1139 and who also possessed Malmesbury Castle. One account says the surviving buildings were started in those years and finished around 1160 to 1170. Another says the Norman church was substantially complete by 1180. The south porch carries the sculpture of that campaign.

A spire of 431 feet, about 131 metres, rose on a tower, and from 1180 until 1221 that tower is recorded as the tallest in the world, a standing that then passed to Old St Paul’s in London. Around 1500 the spire and the tower under it fell in a storm and destroyed much of the east end.

The years of the rebuilding were also the years of the abbey’s historian. William of Malmesbury was born about 1095 or 1096 in Wiltshire, of a Norman father and an English mother, and he spent his adult life as a monk here. His education at the abbey included a little logic and physics, but he gave himself to moral philosophy and history. He helped Abbot Godfrey, whose rule is placed from 1081 to 1105, to collect a library, and he had a first-hand knowledge of at least four hundred works by about two hundred authors.

In 1125 he finished the Gesta Regum Anglorum, the deeds of the English kings, modelled on Bede and running from 449 to 1120. He later carried it to 1127 and dedicated a revision to Robert, earl of Gloucester. In the same year, 1125, he finished the Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, the deeds of the English bishops, for which he travelled, and in which Aldhelm, the learned and wonder-working abbot of Malmesbury, has a large place. He stayed for a time at Glastonbury and wrote on the antiquity of that church for Henry of Blois, abbot there and bishop of Winchester.

Before the Anarchy began in 1139 he had a useful connection with Roger of Salisbury. In 1140 he was offered the abbacy of Malmesbury and declined it, preferring the library and his scholarship. His one public appearance was at the council of Winchester in 1141, where the clergy declared for the Empress Matilda. From about 1140 he wrote the Historia Novella, a chronicle of his own time from 1128 to 1142, including the Anarchy under King Stephen.

The work breaks off with a promise to continue. He is thought to have died about 1143, before he could keep it. C. Warren Hollister described him as perhaps the most learned man in twelfth-century western Europe.

John Milton ranked him among the best English historians of his age. He is a strong witness from 1066 onward, and a more contested one for the earlier reign of Æthelstan. David Dumville dismissed him as a treacherous witness on that king. Sarah Foot is more willing to accept that he used a lost life of Æthelstan, while warning that no one can see how far he improved it.

A window of him was placed in the abbey in 1928, in memory of Canon C. D. H. McMillan, vicar from 1907 to 1919.

King Stephen took the abbey during the Anarchy and appointed John of Malmesbury, who held it only from 1139 to 1140. Peter Moraunt followed, from 1141 to 1159, and obtained a bull from Pope Innocent II. Later in the century Robert, abbot from 1172 to 1176, was a physician to Henry II. Walter Loring, abbot from 1206 to 1222, signed Magna Carta, received a bull from Innocent III, and gained King John’s permission to demolish Malmesbury Castle.

The castle that a bishop-abbot had held, and that a king in civil war had used, was thus cleared by the leave of the king who had been forced to the charter. The abbey’s political weight in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries was not only spiritual. It sat beside a castle, it housed a historian whom both the empress’s party and the bishop of Salisbury had reason to cultivate, and its abbot could put his name to the most famous limit placed on an English king.

The end of the monastic house came under Henry VIII. By the Act of Supremacy in 1534 he was Supreme Head of the Church in England, having broken with papal authority the year before. Thomas Cromwell, his vicegerent in spirituals, had the machinery of the suppression built. An inventory of church wealth, the Valor Ecclesiasticus, was taken so that the Crown could tax it.

Visitors, among them Richard Layton and Thomas Legh, reported on moral laxity and on relics lent out for money. Parliament’s first suppression act, in 1535, allowed the king to dissolve houses with an annual income under £200, though many bought exemption and only 243 houses were dissolved in that first wave. The Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, especially in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, turned Henry toward seeing monasticism as betrayal, because some spared northern houses sided with the rebels. By 1537 the policy was the extinction of monastic life, carried out in form as a voluntary surrender by each superior, with pensions for the monks and nuns.

The second suppression act came in 1539. Much of the property was sold to pay for war in the 1540s.

Malmesbury surrendered on 15 December 1539. The abbot who gave it up was Richard Selwyn. Henry VIII’s commissioners sold the abbey and its lands to William Stumpe, a rich clothier, for £1,517 and 15 shillings. He returned the abbey church to the town for continued use as a parish church, and he filled the monastic buildings with as many as twenty looms.

He also built Abbey House on the site of some of those buildings. The domestic ranges, none of which now stand above ground, had lain on the north side of the church: the cloister immediately north of the nave, the frater beyond it, and the chapter house to the east of the cloister. From 1301 until the middle of the sixteenth century the parish church of the town had been St Paul’s, in what is now Birdcage Walk. Its tower and steeple remain, and serve as the abbey belltower.

In August 1541 Thomas Cranmer licensed the abbey church to replace St Paul’s as the parish church of Malmesbury. A year before Malmesbury’s surrender, in May 1538, Battle Abbey had been suppressed with seventeen monks still in residence, including Abbot John Hamond. Henry gave that house to Sir Anthony Browne, master of the horse, who demolished the church and made the abbot’s lodging a country house. Two Benedictine communities, one planted by the Conqueror on a battlefield and one grown from an Irish hermitage, were both turned into lay property within two years.

The building was already maimed before the sale, and it was maimed again just after. The fall of the spire around 1500 had taken much of the east end. Around 1550 the west tower fell and demolished the three westernmost bays of the nave. Those two collapses are why less than half of the medieval church remains, with the west end of the nave blocked off and the surviving vessel used as the parish church.

During the English Civil War the town suffered, and hundreds of pockmarks from bullets and shot can still be seen on the south, west, and east sides of the abbey. In 1837 the old chapelries of Corston and Rodbourne were made a separate parish, St Paul Malmesbury Without, and St Mary Westport was united to the abbey church.

Later centuries fitted the truncated church with organs and with a few notable graves in the yard. An organ obtained in 1846 had stood in St Benet Fink, Threadneedle Street, in London, and had been made in 1714 by Abraham Jordan. In 1938 a Henry Willis organ arrived, formerly owned by Sir George Alfred Wills, baronet, of Bristol. The present organ dates from 1984 and was built by E.

J. Johnson of Cambridge at a cost of £71,000. In the churchyard lies Hannah Twynnoy, supposedly the first person killed by a tiger in England. She died on 23 October 1703 after teasing a tiger in a menagerie stabled at the White Lion, the public house where she worked.

Her gravestone carries a poem.

The written remains of the abbey matter as much as the stone. The Anglo-Saxon charters of Malmesbury, though extended by forgeries and improvements made in the scriptorium, are still used for the history of Wessex and of the West Saxon church from the seventh century. In 2009 the historian Michael Wood speculated that the abbey was the place where the Old English poem Beowulf was transcribed. That is a speculation, not a demonstrated fact of the scriptorium.

What the charters do show, forgeries and all, is a house that spent centuries defending and enlarging its title to land.

In 1949 the church was designated a listed building at Grade I, under the name Abbey Church of St Mary and St Aldhelm, at the Market Cross. The parts of the monastery no longer in ecclesiastical use were scheduled in 1951, with the scheduling amended in 1992. The scheduled area is the buried and ruined monastic plan, not the parish church that is still prayed in. In 2022 the church was added to the register of heritage at risk.

The roofs of the nave and of both aisles were leaking and needed to be renewed, the timber structures under them needed repair, and some of the twelfth-century stonework was vulnerable, including carvings around the porch. The congregation was described as hard-working and still unable to meet the cost of major repairs. About 65,000 people were counted through the Norman porch in a year, and the cost of keeping the doors open was put at £700 a day. In 2023, grants of £10,000 for the roof and stonework, and of £70,000 for the roof, the porch, and the front, were recorded for the church.

Those sums do not approach the millions named for the whole repair.

The newest evidence for the earliest community was found not inside the church but in the garden of the Old Bell Hotel next door, a building dated to 1220. Excavators uncovered Anglo-Saxon burials of men, women, and children. One account, published in July 2024, says the work was done the year before, as a watching brief required by planning conditions for new building. Another account, published at the end of August 2024, says twenty-four articulated skeletons and the disarticulated remains of twenty-two further people were excavated that July.

The dates given for the remains run from 670 to 940. Four of them have radiocarbon results at about 670 and about 940. If the cemetery belongs to the abbey, the people are unlikely to have been monks. Of the twenty-four articulated skeletons, only seven are adults, and only three of those adults are male.

The other seventeen are children, including newborns. Tony McAleavy, a historian of the abbey who lives in the town, has said that the graves look like the lay people who supported the monks, and that they change the picture of the house in the seventh and eighth centuries, when it was one of the leading centres of scholarship in western Europe. Paolo Guarino, who worked on the dig, said that written sources had always placed the foundation in that period, but that there had been no solid physical evidence of seventh- to ninth-century activity in Malmesbury before this. Some of the burials lay under stone walls that may be medieval, and those walls have been suggested as part of the original monastic complex.

Post-excavation work was still going on in the late summer of 2024, with further dating planned.

In the same season the town held Athelstan 1100, marking eleven centuries since his accession, described in one account as the anniversary of his crowning as the first king of all England. A community dig, the Big Athelstan Dig, opened test pits across the town. One account says thirteen pits, another fifteen. More than two hundred volunteers took part, among them pupils, a young archaeologists’ club, and scouts, and more than a thousand people visited the weekend’s trail.

A sherd of late Anglo-Saxon pottery, possibly of Æthelstan’s time, was among the finds, later shown in the town hall. The hotel excavation and the test pits do not rebuild the lost east end or put the king’s bones back in the empty tomb. They do give the hill its first confirmed human remains from the centuries of Máel Dub and Aldhelm, and they show a community of children and women and men living beside the monastery, not a closed world of monks alone.

What the abbey changed is visible in the town’s name, in the burial of the first king of the English, in the chronicle William wrote from its library, and in the nave that a clothier handed back to the parish. What it lost is just as visible: the east end under the fallen spire, the west bays under the fallen tower, the cloister and chapter house reduced to buried footings, the bones of Máel Dub moved aside, and the bones of Æthelstan lost. The church that remains is still the parish church, still entered through the carved porch, and still carrying the argument of its roofs.