After the high drama of the previous century, the period from 1208 until 1296 was a time of comparative tranquillity and institutional consolidation. During these years the Abbey was ruled over by just four abbots. The first of these, Walter Loring (1208–22), responded astutely to the political crisis that played out during the final years of King John’s reign and greatly increased the Abbey's resources without resort to external patronage. Loring was opportunistic and skilfully exploited the weakness of John's position during the baronial rebellion of 1215–16. On 18 July 1215 the king was in Oxford. He had agreed to Magna Carta just one month earlier, but this had not brought an end to his troubles. When John reached Oxford, he was preparing for war and needed money and supporters. Shortly after arriving the king agreed to sell the castle and borough of Malmesbury, together with control of the three local hundred courts, to Loring. In return for these assets, the abbot made an immediate payment of 60 marks, pledging an annual contribution of £20 to the Crown as a so-called ‘fee farm’.

This was an extremely good deal for the Abbey which obtained, for the first time, ownership of most of the houses in the town, profits from local justice, control of the castle and the right to levy a range of additional fees on townsfolk – such as ‘landgable’ and ‘churchscot’ – that were previously due to the Crown. The clauses relating to the castle were explicitly advantageous to the Abbey: the king, not the abbot, was responsible for the cost of garrisoning the place ‘should there be war in England’. Arguably, the property rights in Malmesbury were not John's to sell because ever since his accession he had been involved in a bitter dispute with the dowager queen, Berengaria, widow of his brother, Richard the Lionheart. Berengaria claimed the profits from Crown holdings in Malmesbury and much else besides, as part of her dower income: in effect, her widow's pension. To compound this problem further, John had also granted the income from Malmesbury to his wife, Isabella of Angoulême, following their marriage in 1200. It seems that John sold the borough of Malmesbury while ignoring the claims of his sister-in-law and without seeking the agreement of his wife.

The destruction of Malmesbury Castle

Things went badly for John in the year that followed the grant of 1215.

Malmesbury Abbey is famous, not only for its continuous longevity (part of it still survives today as the town's parish church), but, even more so, for its having given home to two individuals who were outstanding on the European stage: Aldhelm and William of Malmesbury. In fact, were it not for the writings of these two men, especially William, we should know far less and be much less interested in the Abbey. As it is, our knowledge is very ‘spotty’, and it is to Tony McAleavy's credit that he has not concealed the existence of the gaps, while doing his best to fill them. He sheds light on less well-understood phases of the monastery's history, such as the late Saxon period when celibate monasticism was restored, and the fourteenth century when the monks became entangled in national politics during the reign of Edward II. He gives us, for example, an excellent account of a chronicle written at Malmesbury in the mid-fourteenth century, the Eulogium Historiarum, and identifies, for the first time, its author as Thomas of Bromham. The misdeeds of John of Tintern, abbot in the fourteenth century, have received no previous scholarly attention, and Tintern is a splendid addition to the medieval gallery of ‘criminous clerks’. Thus, the text both synthesises findings from previous Malmesbury scholarship and includes significant new findings based on fresh research. It is greatly enriched by the excellent translations of Michael Winterbottom, many of which have not been previously published.

Tony McAleavy has given us the first connected, scientifically based history of the house, and it will be fundamental to any further research upon it. What remains to be done? It is most unlikely that many more literary sources will emerge, and expansion in our knowledge will only come through archaeology. William peppers the site with Anglo-Saxon churches of which nothing remains above ground, and which were thoroughly demolished after the Norman Conquest. There is much still to be discovered among the ruins and remains.

The years immediately after 1066 were traumatic for the Malmesbury monks, and the prospects did not look promising for an institution that was closely associated with the former royal house of Wessex and the cult of an Anglo-Saxon saint unknown to most Normans. Despite these challenges the monastery managed to weather the storm, and by the end of the reign of the Conqueror the cult of Aldhelm had been endorsed by leading members of the new Norman elite. When seeking to understand this story we are fortunate to have the testimony of the great historian, William of Malmesbury (c. 1086– c. 1143), who devoted considerable attention to the history of the monastery in the decades after 1066 in his Gesta Pontificum. The last Anglo-Saxon abbot, Brihtric, was dismissed and left Malmesbury, later receiving the abbacy of Burton-on-Trent as some sort of compensation. William wrote positively about Brihtric describing how ‘he ruled the house with high distinction for seven years’. He had much less time for the first Norman, Turold, the first Norman abbot, recruited from the Norman monastery of Fécamp, who was high-handed and acted ‘like a tyrant’. Turold's tenure at Malmesbury was extremely brief, and by 1070 he had been replaced by Warin of Lire, who was abbot until around 1091.

William of Malmesbury provided a curiously partisan account of Warin's rule at Malmesbury. He acknowledged that Warin introduced a good level of monastic observance, but he was also highly critical of other aspects of his behaviour, denouncing him as a man whose selfish misuse of the monastery's resources harmed the monks.

On arrival in Malmesbury Warin, at least according to William, treated many of the monastery's pre-Conquest relics with great disrespect.

Abbot William of Badminton (1296–1324) had a long and distinguished public career, and David Knowles considered that he was ‘the only abbot of note’ produced by Malmesbury after 1216. Towards the end of his abbacy he became entangled in the bitter conflict that broke out between Edward II's advisers, the Despensers, and the king's baronial opponents; but prior to this he had been a successful and respected prelate. In 1298, soon after becoming abbot, Badminton was chosen as one of the ‘presidents’ who organised the provincial chapter or conference of all Benedictine abbots in those parts of southern England subject to the archbishop of Canterbury. He continued to act as president until 1310 or 1311, visiting Rome twice, in around 1301–2 and also at some point between 1309 and 1314. Badminton played a central role in the campaign to ensure that the most talented Benedictine monks from English monasteries received a university education. In 1283 a small dependent cell of monks from Gloucester was established at Oxford, and in the 1290s the provincial chapter decided to expand Gloucester College, as it was known, and to make it a college for Benedictine monks from all over the Canterbury archdiocese. In 1298 Malmesbury Abbey was given a major stake in the governance of the institution. By this time a pious nobleman, Sir John Gifford, who owned the college's site, was living in retirement at Malmesbury Abbey, and he granted formal ownership of the premises to Malmesbury: the abbots of Malmesbury became the landlords of the college. William of Badminton appointed the first prior of the newly constituted college, and Malmesbury monks remained involved in the management of the institution throughout the fourteenth century. The site of the college is today part of Worcester College, and a late medieval sculptural shield bearing a griffin, the heraldic device of Malmesbury Abbey, can still be seen on the doorway of one set of rooms.

There is no reason to doubt that the Divine Office was taken seriously under the rule of William of Badminton. A beautiful psalter and hymnal survives from early fourteenth-century Malmesbury, which is held today in the library of Sankt Gallen in Switzerland. The manuscript contains a calendar of feasts celebrated by the Malmesbury monks and the text of the version of the Litany of Saints used by the Abbey.

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.

The succession crisis that followed the death of Henry I in 1135 led to protracted political turmoil and conflict in England. Civil war broke out in 1139, and the monks of Malmesbury witnessed several episodes of conflict in the years that followed. We are blessed with exceptional sources for the study of Malmesbury during Stephen's turbulent reign. William of Malmesbury provided commentary on the early stages of the conflict between Stephen and Matilda in his Historia Novella. William was not an objective witness because the work was commissioned by Robert of Gloucester, Matilda's half-brother and general, who was one of the main actors in the events of the period. Despite his partisan perspective the Historia Novella was carefully written and well-informed, and it remains a source of immense value to historians today. William’s testimony breaks off towards the end of 1142 but the anonymous chronicle, the Gesta Stephani, provides a narrative guide to the whole conflict. Gesta Stephani was written by someone with in-depth knowledge of the Malmesbury area: over a quarter of all the places mentioned in it lie within a 25-mile radius of Malmesbury. On the basis of substantial circumstantial evidence the author has been identified as Robert of Lewes, Bishop of Bath. In addition to the Historia Novella and the Gesta Stephani, other chroniclers such as Henry of Huntingdon and John of Worcester provided detailed accounts of events at Malmesbury during the Anarchy.

It is clear from these contemporary sources that both sides in the war between Stephen and Matilda were anxious to control Malmesbury because of the strategic importance of its castle. The precise location of the castle is not known but it was undoubtedly very close to the conventual church. In his Historia Novella William of Malmesbury stated that Bishop Roger had established the castle ‘in the churchyard itself, hardly a stone’s throw from the abbey’. No trace remains above ground of the structure because the monks, who greatly resented the castle's existence, completely destroyed all traces of the fabric following their acquisition of the site in 1216. However, we can surmise that the castle was substantial and built to a high specification because it was besieged in 1144 and 1153 but on both occasions the attackers were unable to take it by force.

The Black Death had, of course, a devastating impact on Malmesbury Abbey, just as it did on every community in England. Victims probably included Abbot John of Tintern, and the prior of the dependent cell at Pilton, John of Lokyngham, both of whom died in 1349. There were doubtless many other victims in the monastery and the neighbourhood of the Abbey. There is no documentary evidence relating specifically to the death rate among the monks of Malmesbury Abbey but data from other Benedictine communities suggests that the mortality level was often extremely high. At Durham Cathedral Priory about half of the community died during the Black Death. Although we do not know how many monks died, it is possible to estimate quite precisely the rate of mortality among some of the rural poor in the Malmesbury area using the records of Glastonbury Abbey which owned property extremely close to Malmesbury Abbey in north Wiltshire. Four Glastonbury manors lay within a ten-mile radius of Malmesbury: Christian Malford, Grittleton, Kington and Nettleton. The village of Christian Malford was just six miles from Malmesbury and immediately adjacent to the manor of Sutton Benger which belonged to Malmesbury Abbey. Records survive from the Glastonbury archive which can be used to demonstrate the death rate of ‘garciones’, adult male villeins without land, on Glastonbury's Wiltshire estates. It is reasonable to assume that the mortality rate in the villages owned by Malmesbury Abbey resembled that on the nearby Glastonbury lands, where the death rate among this class of villeins ranged from 48% to 66%.

The mortality for townsfolk was doubtless high also. One indicator of the disappearance of whole households in the town is found in legal records from 1352, which state that four men from Malmesbury – Nicholas Handsex, Thomas Smyth, Richard Uphulle and Thomas Terry – were guilty of ‘carrying doors and windows from empty tenements in Malmesbury’.

At a national level the shortage of labour after the Black Death created problems for monastic landlords, and eventually led to the end of direct demesne farming. At Malmesbury this process was protracted: the abandonment of demesne farming took place at some point in the early fifteenth century. The ‘inquisition post-mortem’ for Abbot Walter of Camme, following his death in 1396, indicates that his demesnes were largely still in hand, although with dilapidated buildings and lands wasted by the pestilence.

The story of the earliest days of the monastery at Malmesbury is obscure. The most important figure in the history of the monastic community of Malmesbury was St Aldhelm, who died 709–10 and was recognised during his own lifetime as a scholar and ecclesiastic of national significance. The later tradition of the house held that Aldhelm was not the first abbot, and instead an Irish holy man called Máeldub was revered as the founder of the community. Over four hundred years after Aldhelm's death, William of Malmesbury set out to explain how the monastery of Malmesbury was established by this Irish missionary.

According to William, it was this pre-existing community that Aldhelm joined and ultimately came to lead. It has been suggested that William may have invented some of the detail of his account of the career of Meldum. If the Irishman had indeed been the teacher of Aldhelm one might expect a reference to him in the extensive surviving works of Aldhelm; but there is none. Although understandable doubts have been raised about the Meldum/Máeldub story, there is evidence to suggest that a religious community at Malmesbury was founded by an Irish monk with a name similar to this and that he may well have been Aldhelm's earliest teacher. One early reference to a version of the placename, ‘Malmesbury’, comes from Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, in which he described Aldhelm as the abbot of a monastery called Maildubi Urbs, which means literally ‘the city of Maildub’. The name ‘Maildub’ appears to be a rendering of an authentic Old Irish personal name, Máeldub. Bede was a careful historian and although he was based in Northumbria, he took steps to make sure that his information about the history of the faraway West Saxons was correct.

The monastery at Malmesbury was in effect re-founded in the 960s as part of a wider programme of Benedictine reform in southern England promoted by King Edgar (959–75). This development involved a radical change to the Malmesbury community: the married clergy were evicted and replaced by celibate monks who followed the Rule of St Benedict under the authority of an abbot. The changes were part of a wider campaign to establish Benedictine monasticism as the form of religious life followed in a relatively small but elite and wealthy network of royal monasteries. The intellectual leaders of the movement were Dunstan (archbishop of Canterbury and previously abbot of Glastonbury) and Æthelwold (bishop of Winchester and previously abbot of Abingdon). The Benedictine campaign was linked to developments in monasticism in continental Europe, particularly in northern Francia.

With sponsorship from Edgar, and guidance from Dunstan and Æthelwold, Malmesbury became an important institution within the new network of Benedictine houses. It is possible that the Malmesbury monks, including the abbot, Ælfric I, were recruited from Dunstan's Glastonbury. Certainly, Dunstan took a close personal interest in Malmesbury, and Faricius provided a detailed account of Dunstan's ‘loving regard’ for Malmesbury.

William of Malmesbury endorsed this view and copied out one of Dunstan's ‘curses’ which was inscribed on an organ.

The exact sequence of the events whereby Edgar and Dunstan relaunched celibate monasticism in Malmesbury is unclear, and William of Malmesbury misunderstood the chronology. The monastery preserved in its cartulary a charter of 974, granted by Edgar in favour of Malmesbury, which confirmed ownership of an estate at Eastcourt.

The fifteenth century witnessed important developments in the management of the estates of Malmesbury Abbey. Unfortunately, the evidence is fragmentary or circumstantial, but at some point following the death of Abbot Walter Camme in 1396 the demesne manors of the Abbey were all leased out, and the supervision of agricultural work was no longer a responsibility of the abbot and obedientiaries. The exact chronology is not known but by the time of an inquisition post-mortem following the death of Abbot Thomas Bristow in 1456 only cash income from the manors was recorded, almost certainly indicating that all the demesnes had been leased out.

As in the rest of England, the labour shortages after the Black Death eventually led to the collapse of serfdom on the estates of Malmesbury, and by the early Tudor period only a tiny minority of families in Wiltshire were, in the eyes of the law, villeins. The late medieval estate records of Glastonbury Abbey relating to its north Wiltshire manors are much more comprehensive than any Malmesbury Abbey documents for the same period, but it is reasonable to assume that the trends in the manors held by Malmesbury were similar to those in nearby Glastonbury lands. The Glastonbury estate rental of 1518 made a careful note of any tenants who were serfs, and in the four manors near Malmesbury only one family was identified as having villein status. Serfdom had almost, but not quite, disappeared from north Wiltshire. Malmesbury Abbey did not welcome the disappearance of serfdom, and as late as 1500 the abbot of Malmesbury was accused of wrongly imprisoning a prosperous farmer called Robert Carter, and seizing his livestock, on the grounds that he was the Abbey's villein. Just two years before the Dissolution, in 1537, the last abbot of Malmesbury, Robert Frampton, was charged with falsely claiming that a local man was his ‘bondman’ or serf.

Although the Abbey leased out the demesne farmland during the fifteenth century, wooded closes were retained in several manors. At these locations the abbot had the right of ‘free warren’ entitling him and his guests to hunt specific birds – pheasant and partridge – and hares and rabbits.

William of Malmesbury made no reference in his surviving works to one of the most dramatic events in the history of the Abbey that he personally witnessed: the deposition by Bishop Roger of Salisbury of Abbot Aedulf in 1118. We only know that this happened because it was recorded in the chronicle known as Annales de Wintonia, which stated that in the immediate aftermath of Queen Matilda's death Aedulf was dismissed ‘without good cause’ from the abbacy of Malmesbury. It is no coincidence that this act was recorded in a Winchester chronicle because Aedulf was a Winchester monk prior to his promotion to Malmesbury. To the profound annoyance of the Malmesbury community, Bishop Roger then became titular abbot and treated the institution as an episcopal priory rather than an autonomous abbey. In the years that followed William of Malmesbury played a central role in a protracted but discreet campaign to question the correctness of Roger's takeover. He began work almost immediately on this project: in around 1119 William produced an edition of the papal history known as Liber Pontificalis, in which he included the full text of the ‘privilege’ of Sergius, the document granting the monastery perpetual exemption from episcopal interference.

During the early 1120s William was working on his major historical works: Gesta Regum and Gesta Pontificum. He used both works to indicate, in a veiled way, that the Malmesbury community rejected the legitimacy of Roger's power over them. In Gesta Pontificum William incorporated the full text of three ancient documents, all of which appeared to indicate that the independence of Malmesbury from episcopal control had been solemnly endorsed in charters granted to Aldhelm. The first was the ‘privilege’ of Sergius. The second was Bishop Leuthere's ‘foundation charter’, which purported to date from 675 and declared that no future bishop should ‘exercise a tyrant's power’ over the monastery. The third document was a charter supposedly issued by Aldhelm himself in 705, which included a directive forbidding future episcopal interference. The ‘privilege’ of Sergius may contain authentic elements, but the other two charters are generally seen as twelfth-century forgeries designed, probably with the collusion of William, to invalidate the claims of Bishop Roger. The Leuthere charter contains a highly suspicious clause forbidding future bishops or kings from meddling in the monastery’s liberties.

During the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries Malmesbury was home to a remarkable scholar known to posterity as William of Malmesbury. He was one of the great historians of the Middle Ages, and accounts by modern historians of political events in England during the eleventh and early twelfth centuries still rely heavily on information provided by William's major historical works: Gesta Pontificum, Gesta Regum and Historia Novella. In addition to these well-known surveys of national history, William wrote many other works on a range of topics such as biblical commentary, the miracles of the Virgin Mary, the lives of saints and the history of Glastonbury. William broke off from writing his last work, Historia Novella, at the end of 1142, and it is generally assumed that he died shortly afterwards.

In recounting the story of the Norman Conquest in the Gesta Regum William explained that he was of mixed parentage, both English and Norman. This, he felt, positioned him ideally as an objective and fair commentator on the career of William the Conqueror.

William joined the community at Malmesbury as a boy and remained a monk of Malmesbury for the rest of his life. He was, by his own account, a studious child and recalled in Gesta Regum how he acquired a love of learning from both his parents.

Establishing when William of Malmesbury was born, and when he joined the Malmesbury community, is not straightforward.

No trace remains above ground of Aldhelm's monastery, and the precinct has not been subject to any modern archaeological investigation. 1 We are forced therefore to rely on clues found in documentary sources, such as the works of Aldhelm and William of Malmesbury, when trying to reconstruct the early monastic campus. In the Gesta Pontificum William stated that a ‘very small church’ reputed to have been built by Máeldub was extant until his own time, and he also described how Aldhelm built new churches for the community.

In another part of the Gesta Pontificum William stated that the chief monastic church was dedicated not just to St Peter but jointly to ‘the chief of the apostles, Peter and Paul’, and this church ‘was from of old the centre, the place at which the monks came together’. William's account of the monastic campus is consistent with early English and contemporary Frankish usage, with two main monastic churches ‘one dedicated to an apostle or martyr, the other to St Mary’. William indicated that, in addition, there were at least two other smaller churches: the chapel of Máeldub and a church dedicated to St Michael, which was probably a mortuary chapel, given that such chapels were often dedicated to St Michael, an archangel who could act as a guide to the dead on their journey to Heaven. Significantly William preserved the tradition that Aldhelm was initially buried in St Michael’s.

One of Aldhelm's poems supports the idea that he built a substantial church at Malmesbury which was dedicated jointly to St Peter and St Paul. This source also gives us some flavour of the collective worship in the church.

Around the year 1360 a monk of Malmesbury called Thomas of Bromham set out to write a history of the world, from the Creation to the present day. Bromham's book is generally known today as Eulogium Historiarum although the author called it simply Eulogium. A first draft of the work was completed by 1362, but the author continued to revise the book, adding extra material until late 1366, at which point the chronicle breaks off abruptly. The author's autograph manuscript has survived and is held by Trinity College, Cambridge. While Bromham was not a writer of the calibre of Aldhelm or William of Malmesbury, his work sheds light on the intellectual life and interests of the Abbey in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death.

The writer of the Eulogium was, without doubt, a monk of Malmesbury Abbey. Although the work was a universal history that attempted to summarise in encyclopaedic fashion the totality of human experience, significant prominence was also given to events and personalities relating to Malmesbury. There are frequent references to Malmesbury throughout the text, and the chronicle often juxtaposes events of national or international significance with information about the history of Malmesbury. We are told, for example, that in 637 the Prophet Muhammad died, and that ‘in the same year the monastery of Malmesbury was founded’. Similarly, for 675 the key events considered worthy of record were the devastation of Sicily by Muslim Arabs and Aldhelm's success in moving the Malmesbury community to a site provided by the local bishop. This pattern of juxtaposing local and much wider history can be seen throughout the work. The summary entry for 1215, for example, relates how in that year the baronial enemies of King John seized control of London and Abbot Walter Loring obtained control of Malmesbury Castle.

The Malmesbury provenance of the chronicle is thus patent, but the authorship is less clear. The work is presented as an anonymous text, but the Victorian editor of the Eulogium, Frank Scott Haydon, skilfully worked out that the author's first name was manifestly Thomas. In an account of a miraculous vision towards the end of Book III of the work, the writer refers to St Thomas of Canterbury as ‘nostro patrono’ meaning ‘our patronal saint’.