Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Timeline
- List of Abbreviations
- Part I From Minster to Abbey (701–1078)
- Part II Abbot Walter (1078–1104)
- Part III Twelfth-Century Themes (1104–1215)
- Afterword
- Appendix: The Abbots of Evesham to 1215
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Timeline
- List of Abbreviations
- Part I From Minster to Abbey (701–1078)
- Part II Abbot Walter (1078–1104)
- Part III Twelfth-Century Themes (1104–1215)
- Afterword
- Appendix: The Abbots of Evesham to 1215
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
THERE are few visible remains of the church of Evesham but there are many surviving records of its 800-year history, from its origin as a minster around the year 701 to its dissolution as a Benedictine abbey in 1540. For all those years it was a house of continual prayer while being at the same time an institution that governed the religious, economic, and social life of the Vale of Evesham. One could hardly find a more suitable part of England in which to observe the tense interplay of lordship and prayer over so many centuries. But the records are not straightfoward. Between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries Evesham abbey used imagination and artifice to create documents that were meant to represent its early history. The procedure sought to give Evesham a foundation story that linked it to the Virgin Mary, to supply a set of title deeds to its estates, and to furnish an array of precedents and privileges to show that it had never been subject to the bishops of Worcester. To those ends, admirable in themselves, the monks felt justified in preparing a dossier of texts in which unfavourable facts were suppressed and favourable ones selected, and in which the meagre remnant was improved and augmented with myth and legend. So thoroughly were those elements blended that historians were long unable to get at the truth. It became customary for each to express a proper scepticism and then, for want of anything else, to relate exactly what the suspect records said. In 1904 the Benedictine scholar Dame Laurentia McLachlan found it to be the simplest course in her book Saint Egwin and his Abbey of Evesham, which is still the only full-length history of the house. But there have been such advances in the interpretation of documents and archaeological remains that the monks’ difficult materials can now be probed more confidently.
Hence this book. I have tried to hold its themes in a chronological framework throughout, and that has not been difficult in the first two parts, which end in 1104. But coming to the twelfth century I have found so much information that I have separated it into thematic chapters. Even so, I have tried in Part III to keep some sense of movement through time.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Church and Vale of Evesham, 700-1215Lordship, Landscape and Prayer, pp. x - xiPublisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015