4 - Ecgwine and the First Abbots

Summary

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.