This chapter draws on research into the lives and prison experiences of around 650 male and female convicts who were released on licence (an early form of parole) from sentences of long-term imprisonment in England in the mid- to late nineteenth century. While both men and women were overwhelmingly committed to the convict system for larceny, their treatment differed significantly. The vast majority of convicts were released early on licence from their prison terms, even those committing very serious offences. However, female offenders were released slightly earlier and under different conditions than men. Having offended against their gender as well as society, more moral rehabilitation was deemed necessary for deviant women than for men, leading to requirements such as entering refuges or shelters. Female convicts’ internment in these institutions after being granted a licence reveals the impact of gender expectations on female prisoners in England.

FOR much of his life Æthelwig had been troubled by an intermittent form of gout. It was very painful and he was said to have been ‘worn out’ by it before he died. That was on 16 February 1078 and within three months a page was turned when the king appointed Walter as the new abbot. It was the first time since 1014 that someone not a monk of Evesham had taken up the position and Walter was, of course, the first foreigner ever to be chosen. When he arrived at Evesham he was completely unknown to the community, but the personal contrast between Walter and Æthelwig was immediately obvious to the all-English monks, for Walter was a cultured Norman and was younger and physically fitter than Æthelwig had been in recent years. He had been promoted to Evesham from Canterbury, where he had been a chaplain to Archbishop Lanfranc, and his association with the learned Lanfranc went back to the 1060s, when Lanfranc was abbot of Caen in Normandy and Walter was his pupil there. Before Caen and Canterbury Walter had been a monk at the abbey of Cerisy-la- Forêt, thirty miles west of Caen. A fellow pupil and friend at Caen was Gundulf, later bishop of Rochester (1077–1108); they were able and ambitious young men and Lanfranc was evidently grooming them for high office. The chronicler William of Malmesbury relates that Walter and Gundulf were one day at Caen studying a gospel-book with Lanfranc, and while Lanfranc's attention was momentarily distracted they decided to play a game. They said ‘Let us turn the pages and see which of us is to be abbot and which bishop.’ They came to the gospel of Matthew, and in the twenty-fourth chapter Gundulf's finger alighted on the words ‘a faithful and wise servant, whom the lord hath appointed over his family’, while in the next chapter Walter found the line ‘good and faithful servant, … enter thou into the joy of thy lord’. They began laughing over these promising words and when Lanfranc asked them what they were so happy about, they confessed. Without hesitation Lanfranc is then said to have predicted that Gundulf would become a bishop and Walter an abbot.

IN 1190 the disgraced former prior of Christ Church Canterbury, Roger Norreis, had been foisted upon Evesham abbey in succession to Abbot Adam. It turned out to be an even greater misfortune than the monks might have imagined, and one that would be compounded during Roger's long abbacy by a frustrating three-way struggle between Norreis, who was a charming but dangerous libertine, the Evesham monk Thomas of Marlborough, a vigorous, tenacious, and eloquent lawyer, and Master Mauger, their conscientious and respected bishop.

Norreis's family background is unknown except that he had a nephew (nepos) called Roger and a kinsman called Matthew Dolfin; Dolfin and Norreis are surnames that indicate northern ancestry. In his first few years at Evesham the abbot's conduct seemed acceptable but as he became accustomed to the privileges of office the flaws in his character began to assert themselves, and privilege then turned to licence and licence to utter wantonness. All the while he was able to cloak his weaknesses in a seductive bonhomie that was hard to resist. Fluent and impressive in speech, he had the air of being both learned and courtly, and in his quarters he kept a convivial table at which good food and drink were freely enjoyed by his household, his guests, and himself. Norreis allowed himself the luxuries, unusual for a monk, of sleeping in linen sheets, of wearing comfortable shirts and linen garments, of sporting smart boots like a knight’s, and of going about the abbey in a cape instead of in the customary monastic dress. Such were the attributes of a secular baron, not an abbot, and he made no attempt to conceal them from the convent. Still less appropriate to a monk was Roger's enjoyment of carnal relations with women, with some of whom he was reputed to have fathered children. Needless to say, he disappointed early expectations that he might sometimes attend the church, consult the monks in chapter, dine with them, or sit with them in the cloister. Although the abbots of Evesham had begun to live apart from the monks long before Abbot Roger's time, with him the separation was taken beyond acceptable limits.

IT is clear from archaeological finds that Anglo-Saxon cultural influences had arrived in the left-bank area by the early sixth century, and by the end of the seventh century there were several burial grounds in which the graves were furnished in Germanic style with such items as beads, brooches, spears, and shields. Before the Norman Conquest other places nearby were reputed to be the sites of pagan burials. The richest of the Germanic-style graves known to us were discovered when a railway cutting was made at Great Hampton near Evesham in 1862. The remains of at least two people were found there and two spearheads and a large knife blade were recovered. Also in the graves at Great Hampton was a delicately made seventh-century gold and garnet pin suite, a dress or hair fastening made up of two pins linked by an ornamental chain and pendant. So costly an item shows that in the seventh century the local population included not only subsistence farmers but also men and women with money and prestige. Such privileged people may have had high standing within an orderly and stratified society; order is certainly implied by the existence of an early place of public assembly at a burial mound called ‘Fissesberg’ (‘Fisc's barrow’), which has been plausibly identified at Blackminster near Offenham (Fig. 3). From some unknown period matters affecting the whole area were discussed there and decisions approved and promulgated. Much remains uncertain but it seems reasonable to believe that Evesham minster's lands on the left bank of the Avon were not marginal in 703 but were populous and productive, just as they had been in Roman times. There is even some evidence that in 703 the farmers, though Anglo-Saxon in culture, were of the same Celtic blood as their Romano-British predecessors and were occupying settlements that had evolved directly from theirs.

The Britons

Anglo-Saxon culture pervaded the Vale of Evesham by the end of the seventh century but most of the inhabitants of the minster's land on both sides of the river were probably descended from Iron Age or Romano-British people. Local evidence of that comes from the former land unit known as ‘Wycweon’, which lay about two miles south-east of Evesham and has long been divided into the conjoined parishes of Childswickham and Wickhamford (Fig. 3).

AS bishop of the Hwicce Ecgwine had responsibility for an area that would later constitute the counties of Gloucester and Worcester and part of Warwickshire. The territory was so large that he would have been unable to devote more than a fraction of his attention to any particular part of it, and he could not have seen to the daily administration of his new minster at Evesham. According to Byrhtferth Ecgwine was the first abbot there, but that would have been in the sense that he had strategic control over the minster's affairs, not that he lived at Evesham with the community. As soon as the minster began to function Ecgwine would have needed to delegate the day-to- day management of it to a resident superior, just as Benedict Biscop had done some twenty years before in his foundations at Jarrow and Wearmouth; Benedict was abbot of both but each had its own abbot subordinate to him. At Evesham the first resident head was probably Æthelwald. He is the first man named in a tenth-century chronological list of the abbots. He also seems to be mentioned in a papal privilege in favour of Evesham; it purports to have been granted in 713 by Pope Constantine I at the request of Æthelwald, who is there described as the minster's envoy to Rome.

Some elements of the 713 privilege, in its received form, are clearly anachronistic, but at least one of the clauses may be authentic because there seem to be contemporary parallels for it: the Evesham privilege stipulates that the community should be allowed to elect its own abbot after the death of the previous head. A clause to that effect can be found in other alleged papal privileges of the period such as that which Pope Constantine is said to have granted for the minsters at Bermondsey and Woking, a document that may have an authentic basis, and the privilege that Pope Agatho (678–81) issued for the minster of St Peter and St Paul (later St Augustine's abbey) at Canterbury, where the surviving text is certainly based on a genuine original. It is also recorded that Benedict Biscop obtained a papal privilege for Wearmouth in 679 and that Wilfrid did the same for Ripon and Hexham between 679 and 680.

Æthelwald fl.713–25

Ealdberht

Ealdberht (another?)

Ealdferth

Tilberht fl.759

Cuthwulf

Ealdmund

Credan fl.777

Thingcferth fl.803

Ealdbald

Ecgberht fl.824

Ealhferth fl.855×?

Wulfheard

Wulfsige fl.897

Cynehelm fl.899–904

Cynath fl.916–29

Eaba fl.929?

Cynath (again) fl.930

Eadwine fl.931–9

Osweard fl.970–74

Freothegar fl.?×983

Ælfric fl.997

Ælfgar fl.1002

Brihtmær

Æthelwine ?–1013

Ælfweard c.1014–1044

Manni (Wulfmær) 1044–58

Æthelwig 1058–78

Walter 1078–1104

Maurice c.1104–c.1121

Robert c.1121–c.1130

Reynold 1130–49

William de Andeville 1149–59

Roger 1159–60

Adam 1161–89

Roger Norreis 1190–1213

Randal 1214–29

WALTER could not expect to match Æthelwig's experience and aptitude when it came to worldly matters and when he first came to Evesham he also had much to learn about local people and their personal connections. It was almost inevitable that in some respects Walter's abbacy would begin by upsetting them. Matters were especially difficult for him because he had also to contend with the resentment felt by everyone whom Æthelwig had outmanoeuvred to gain estates for the abbey; they nursed a latent bitterness, which Æthelwig's personal authority had forced them to suppress. Among the aggrieved parties the monks of Worcester cathedral priory were the ones most able to put their feelings about Æthelwig into words, and they propagated a story that implied that God shared their hostility towards him. They said that when Bishop Wulfstan heard that Æthelwig was dead his natural charity had moved him to offer prayers for the abbot's soul but that on doing so he had been instantly stricken with the abbot's disease of gout. When Wulfstan's physicians were unable to find a cure, he had resorted to prayer and it was revealed to him one night that it was his praying for Æthelwig that had incurred the affliction. Wulfstan stopped interceding for him and within a few days had completely recovered.

Walter was unable to reverse the local ill-will that Æthelwig's death had released, but his own initial tactlessness made matters worse. Walter had refused to accept as his feudal tenants many of the English people who had commended their estates to Æthelwig's personal protection. Walter did so in order that he could oust the holders and gain unfettered control of their land. Moreover, it was suspected that Walter was acting partly under the influence of young relatives who had followed him to Evesham in expectation of gains for themselves. They were not disappointed, in fact, for in due course Walter would enfeoff his brother Randal, against the monks’ wishes, with the manors of Weethley and Kinwarton in Warwickshire and Lark Stoke in Gloucestershire, and probably with the manor of Abbots Morton near Evesham, as well as with substantial estates at Littleton and Bretforton.

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.

THE abbot had complete authority within the monastery as long as he acted within the precepts of the ‘Rule of St Benedict’, and since Evesham abbey itself enjoyed virtual autonomy in the twelfth century, there was no external check on that. Within the abbey walls it was therefore in the abbot's power to produce a state of tyranny or one of anarchy. In practice, however, neither extreme was reached at Evesham before the 1190s, and then both were suffered at once. For most of the century a middle course was followed, in which the abbot was willing to take into consideration the views of the monks and to act in their best interests. In overall charge under the abbot were the prior, the sub-prior, the third prior, and certain ‘keepers of discipline’ (custodes ordinis). Four tiers of authority thus stood between the ordinary monks and the abbot's household. If the abbot appeared anywhere, all were expected to stand and bow as he passed; an exception was made on those occasions when he entered the dormitory. If he sat down, no-one was allowed to sit next to him unless asked to do so. If one received anything from his hand, or gave him anything, one had to kiss the hand. There were therefore few occasions on which a monk might be able to speak directly to the abbot.

Whenever the abbot was away, the daily running of the monastery's affairs outside the cloister and the claustral buildings was in the hands of the prior. The prior could summon a ‘chapter’ of all the abbey servants and punish any that were guilty of misconduct. He was owed great deference but was not quite so remote a figure as the abbot; for instance, the monks were not required to stand up when the prior entered the cloister area but, if he sat down there, those next to him had to rise, and any monk whom he came upon seated outside the cloister also had to stand up. The sub-prior (or ‘prior of the cloister’) was expected to be in attendance on the prior whenever possible and to be responsible for discipline within the cloister area. When the prior was away the sub-prior exercised the prior's powers to make decisions and to punish or pardon offenders, except in serious cases which had to await the return of the prior or the abbot.