1 - A domination of abbots

Summary

The Augustinian abbey of St Mary, Cirencester, was ‘perhaps the order's most important individual house’ in England.1 It was ‘exceptionally well-founded’ by Henry I in 1117, and in 1131 the first abbot, Serlo, was consecrated. Four centuries later, in 1535, ‘its revenues were much greater than those of all other Austin houses save Waltham and Leicester’, an observation that applies to its earlier history, since it acquired little property beyond the town and Seven Hundreds of Cirencester after its foundation. It became a casualty of the Henrician Reformation ‘on the morning of 19 December 1539’.4 The abbey's lordship over the town lasted 422 years. It took about two centuries to achieve its high-point of supremacy, in the early fourteenth century. How that hegemony was achieved, and efforts to subvert it began, are the subjects of this chapter.

The constitutional status of Cirencester was disputed through four centuries of monastic domination, and has been a subject of controversy among historians. When the abbey was founded the town's key institutions, the market and the parish church, had existed for centuries. The long economic boom of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had yet to make a mark on its vocations and composition; at this time the residents appear to have been farmers and gardeners with other skills that could be of service to passing traffic: victuallers, inn- and tavern-keepers, smiths and carpenters also seem certain to have been present, all of them perhaps, at this time, part-time agriculturalists.