Prologue: Before the Monastery

Summary

Malmesbury Abbey is one of England's great medieval sites. Its significance is considerable but often underestimated: a Christian community lived and worshipped on this site more or less continuously for over eight centuries – from around 670 to 1539 – and during these years the Abbey was an important national institution for a shifting combination of religious, artistic, cultural and political reasons. By 700 the monastery was one of the leading centres of higher learning in Britain and Ireland, with a library that could match any in western Europe. The large fragment of the Abbey church that still survives today is a masterpiece of twelfthcentury Romanesque architecture and the south porch contains some of the finest sculpture of the period in England. Malmesbury had many links with royalty, both before and after the Conquest: it was originally endowed jointly by the royal houses of both Wessex and Mercia; Æthelstan chose the place as his mausoleum; Edmund Ironside was married there; Queen Matilda, wife of the Conqueror, was a patron; and Henry I gave control of the monastery to his wife, Matilda of Scotland, as part of her dower.

The monastery produced two great writers: Aldhelm, the first English ‘man of letters’ (died c. 709), and William of Malmesbury, the most learned English historian of the high Middle Ages (died c. 1143). The place was also home to many other now largely forgotten individuals who led surprisingly interesting lives, such as: Faricius of Arezzo, the Italian monk who became the personal physician to Henry I; William of Colerne, the farming abbot who transformed the economic fortunes of the Abbey in the thirteenth century; Thomas of Bromham, the chronicler and English nationalist who envisaged a messianic role for the Black Prince; and John of Tintern, the criminal abbot who lived openly with his lover in the 1340s and was accused by local people of arson and murder. The monastery was established in the seventh century in unsettled times, and perhaps it is unsurprising, therefore, that the most striking features of the topography of the site are its strong natural defences. The historic centre of Malmesbury is built on a plateau which tops an elevated promontory of oolitic limestone.