User:Tenpop421/sandbox

Reading Abbey is a ruined medieval abbey in the town of Reading, Berkshire. It is a Grade I listed building and scheduled monument in England. The ruined abbey buildings form a valuable example of Norman architecture, surviving at near their original height. Several valuable relics have been stored at the Abbey, including an very early depiction of the Coronation of the Virgin, the Hand of St James and the lost tomb of Henry I. As of 2018, the Abbey is open freely for visitors.

The Abbey was a royal favorite for much of its existence. Its founder, King of England Henry I, was buried at the Abbey and he and his family generously endowed the abbey the Abbey with lands and relics. As of the 12th-century, it contained no fewer than 242 relics. It ranked among the 10 wealthiest Benedictine abbeys in the 14th-century.

In the 1530s, Henry VIII instituted the Dissolution of the Monasteries as part of the English Reformation and Hugh Cook of Faringdon, the last abbot of Reading, was executed. The abbey was slowly dismantled and sold off, its stones forming the basis of several buildings throughout Reading and as far as Shiplake. The abbey endured further damage during the Siege of Reading in the course of the English Civil War. The former abbey complex was ruined. Academic interest in the Abbey enjoyed a renewal in the 20th-century, with several excavations and discoveries during this period - including the discovery stone of the Coronation of the Virgin and various evidence of Anglo-Saxon occupation of the Abbey. The Abbey, closed in 2009 for its dangerous and poor condition, underwent restoration in 2018 in a £3.15 million conservation project, partly funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Background
On the site of the Abbey, excavations from 1971 to 1973 revealed an Anglo-Saxon foundation trench and nearby Saxon pottery and tools, alongside scattered Bronze Age and Roman sherds, which have been interpreted by archeologist C. F. Slade as evidence of ecclesiastical Saxon occupation between the 5th and 8th-centuries.

The lands in Reading, later to be endowed to Reading Abbey, had been previously occupied by a female religious community in the late 9th to early 10th centuries. An abbess of this nunnery, Leofrun, is attested in the c. 1000 AD New Minster Liber Vitae. In the Foundation Charter of the Abbey, it mentions the community had since been destroyed for its sins and fallen in the hands of the laity. The causes or date of this destruction is unknown but by 1066 it was in royal hands, and by 1086 the Domesday Book reports these lands were occupied by the abbot of Battle - though this is not definite evidence that the nunnery was destroyed by then.

Alongside this order at Reading, two other orders at Cholsey and Leominster had been granted to the Abbey in its Foundation Charter. The Foundation Charter similarly claims these lands had religious communities which had been destroyed for their sins and left in the hands of the laity. The veracity of such reports of destruction have been doubted by historian Pauline Stafford - though it is certain that all these lands were in the hands of the laity by 1066, with Cholsey owned by King Edward and Leominster, Queen Edith.

Founding and endowment: 1121-1164
(image of 12th-century abbey seal from )

The abbey was founded in 18 June 1121 by Henry I of England as a site of pilgrimage, Cluniac monastery and royal mausoleum for himself. The Foundation Charter of the Abbey laid out Henry's motives for the construction of the Abbey, the salvation of his soul and the souls of his relatives - especially important to Henry in the wake of his the untimely death of his first son and heir, William Adelin, in the White Ship. The specific location of the Abbey was chosen for what William of Malmesbury described as "reception of almost all who might have occasion to travel to the most populous cities of England", being located in the second largest Berkshire borough and bounded by the trade route of the River Kennet. Henry gave the Abbey much liberty, asserting its freedom from various land taxes in the Foundation Charter and endowing it several properties, including a mint in London. Excavations at the ruins of the Abbey reveal building work had started on the Abbey Church in the mid-1120s. After around 40 years of construction, the Abbey Church was consecrated in 1164 by Thomas Becket, attended by Henry II.

Henry I had close connections to the Cluny Abbey in France, his nephew Henry of Blois was a Cluniac monk and he financed the Abbey's reconstruction in the 1120s. Throughout the 11th-century, he founded several Cluniac priories in Britain. Reading Abbey was not a straightforwardly dependent Cluniac priory

Henry died in Normandy on 1135, his body was brought to, as yet unfinished, Reading Abbey for burial. Henry was buried on 5 January 1136 and his, now lost, tomb was laid at the altar of the Church. Queen Adeliza cultivated a cult surrounding Henry's tomb at the abbey, with Adeliza pledging 100 shillings worth of land and a 110 shilling allowance to the abbey. She set up sanctuary lamps surrounding the tomb and in 1151, she too was buried at the Abbey. This cult was furthered by Adeliza's family: her husband William d'Aubigny, brother Joscelin, and son William. Henry's family only further added to these gifts, with Empress Matilda and King Stephen adding to the Abbey's lands and wealth alongside King David II permitting a daughter house in Scotland. In 1150 during the Anarchy between Matilda and Stephen, King Stephen raised a castle in the Forbury Gardens of Reading Abbey - the remains of this castle now form a mound in the Gardens, called Forbury Hill.

(gifts of land from Henry I, Matilda & Stephen) Throughout its history Reading received lands from the English royalty, but the bulk of its lands were endowed before 1154. Henry I's initial gifts of land to the Abbey, described by Brian Kemp as "generous by any standards", consisted of the manors and parishes of Leominster and Cholsey, the manor of Thatcham and the church of Wargrave - all confirmed in the 1125 Foundation Charter.

see esp., ,

Dissolution and ruining: 1539-1900


In the 16th-century, culminating from a series of disagreements between himself and the Pope, Henry VIII instituted a break from Rome; between 1532 and 1534, parliament enacted a set of acts overturning the authority of the pope, the 1534 Acts of Supremacy declaring Henry the "Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England". This commenced the English Reformation, transforming England from a Catholic nation into a Protestant one, continued throughout the 16th-century by Henry's ancestor's, Edward VI and Elizabeth I, with an brief but aggressive attempted reversal by Mary I in between. As part of this Reformation, Henry VII instituted a set of ecclesiastical reforms called the Dissolution of the Monasteries, disbanding religious houses, appropriating their income and seizing their properties. The Suppression of Religious Houses Act 1535 dissolved all religious houses with incomes below £200 per year, eradicating all but 552 monasteries in England. These surviving monasteries were soon dissolved as well, with the Suppression of Religious Houses Act 1539.

The abbey and it's abbot at the time, Hugh Faringdon, seemed to be on good terms with Henry and his advisors. Hugh had petitioned the pope to allow Henry's annulment of Catherine of Aragon and let out the abbey's library for those arguing in his favor. This support was reciprocated by Henry who, in 1532, sent him a new year's gift of £20. In 1537, Hugh had presided over the body of Henry's wife Jane Seymour during her lying in state. In 1534, the abbey granted an allowance of 20 marks to Henry's advisor Thomas Cromwell and in 1536, he and his son, Gregory Cromwell were made stewards of the abbey, affording them £20 yearly. Cromwell was one of the most zealously protestant of Henry's advisors and Henry later appointed him as the prime enforcer of the Dissolution, so these gifts were probably given in hopes of some religious leeway during the anti-monastic reforms.

The abbey survived the first of the monastic reforms in 1535, with its income at around £2000 per year exempting it, but by the second act the Abbey could no longer remain immune. In 1539, Cromwell attempted to persuade the abbot Hugh Faringdon to voluntarily surrender the Abbey's land to their officials, but he refused and Cromwell's officials arrested him under charges of High Treason for denying the royal supremacy of the English Church, captured from his hiding place in Bere Court, Pangbourne. As of 17 September 1539, Hugh was imprisoned within the Tower of London. He was taken to Reading for a public trial in November, alongside the clerks John Enyon and John Rugge who had been participants in the Pilgrimage of Grace, and was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. On the 14 November, Hugh was executed in Reading - the French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, reported Hugh's remains were gibbeted by the 30 November. Hugh died a Catholic martyr and he was beatified by the Catholic Church in 1895.

Upon Hugh's execution, the properties of the abbey were subsumed by the crown and its monastic duties dissolved. The abbey was treated as a quarry of public use, abandoned of its religious uses. The earliest record of the Abbey's dismantling began when a 1548 estimate of the amount of lead on the roof was made. The crown official George Hynde oversaw the dismantling and selling off of the Abbey's building material, detailing the buying of the abbey's stones, fabrics and various raw materials. The raw materials released in the abbey's demolition benefited several new buildings in the Reading area; the rebuilding of the old Reading Minster between 1550 and 1553; the building of soldier's lodging at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle in c. 1557, the stone transported via water; in 1562, the repairing of 19 bridges in Reading under Elizabeth's permission. These fragments survive throughout Reading and as far away as Shiplake, forming walls, quarries and other such local structures. By the end of the century, the Abbey was ruined. According to Ron Baxter and Stewart Harrison, "the cloister arcade was gone, the church was roofless and probably lacked most of its choir. Most of the Lady Chapel may still have been standing, although ashlar had been removed from its walls and window and door surrounds". One complex of buildings in the Abbey remained: the Abbey House, the lavish former lodgings of the abbot, which was converted into a royal palace by Henry and his descendants. Elizabeth herself visited this palace several times and lent it out to her treasurer, Sir Francis Knollys.

During the Siege of Reading from 23 April to 27 April 1643 during English Civil War, the Abbey was further ruined. The town was held by the monarchist Sir Arthur Aston with a garrison of 3,000 men and 300 horses besieged by a parliamentarian force of 16,000 men and 3,000 horses under Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex. Defensive works were raised around the site of the Abbey Church, with a Rampart constructed from the Abbey's stone. The parliamentarian siege further damaged the remains of the Abbey buildings, finally demolishing the Abbey Church. The town was captured by the Earl and held by parliamentarian forces for the rest of the war. After the civil war, the first proper surveys were made of the Abbey and its remains, revealing the extent of the damage. These surveyors judged the Abbey House to be suitable for demolition, leaving only the Abbey Gateway standing as part of the complex.

Modern interest, excavation and restoration: 1900-2019
In the summer of 2009, the ruins of the Abbey were shut down by the local council after a survey revealed the "poor and rapidly deteriorating condition of the walls" of the Abbey. From 2016 to 2018, as part of the Reading Abbey Revealed project to revitalize interest in the Abbey, a major conservation project was funded to restore and make safe the Abbey's crumbling architecture. £3.15 million was invested in this project, financed jointly by the National Lottery Heritage Fund (£1.73m) and Reading Borough Council (£1.36m). This conservation involved new methods of soft-capping the crumbling walls with turf, to protect against water damage, and applying medieval lime mortar techniques in the restoration. This replaced the earlier methods of simply replacing the medieval mortar with modern mortar, which soon dried out and could not protect against rainfall. The Abbey reopened on the 16 June 2018 and several public events were held at the Abbey in celebration, including open air theatre and cinema events.

see esp., ,

Books
see esp., ,

Foundation Charter
The

Sumer Is Icumen In
Sumer Is Icumen In (also known as the Summer Canon or Reading Rota) is a medieval Wessex dialect Middle English secular rota which survives as the earliest extant composition of English polyphony. The earliest record of the rota survives in a mid 13th-century manuscript, BL Harley 978, which was commissioned at Reading in the 13th-century, perhaps by the Reading monks W. de Wycombe or William of Winchester. Harley 978 is a miscellaneous collection of musical, literary and medical prose and verse, written in four hands and containing, among other texts, examples of Goliardic verse such as the Song of Lewes, poems of Walter Map, and a calendar of Reading Abbey. The rota is recorded with both English and Latin lyrics, alongside sheet music (the Latin probably being an ecclesiastical translation of an original English folk song).

Architecture


see esp., , ,

Hospitium of St John
The Hospitium of St John lies on the western boundary of the abbey, north of St Laurence's Church, constructed with rubble walls incorporating stones from the ruined Abbey. It was founded by the Abbot Hugh II between 1189 and 1193 as a part of a larger complex of buildings serving as guest housing for pilgrims visiting the Abbey, once housing around 400 peopler. It was supressed by Henry VII in 1479 and was made into a boy's grammar school in 1485 for its impiety in Henry's view. The building went through several uses before it was converted into laboratories for Reading University in 1892. As of 2011, it's a nursery.

Hospital of St Mary Magdalene
The Hospital of St Mary Magdalene was a leper hospital, established in Reading Abbey by the abbot Anscher, between 1131 and 1135. The Hospital housed 13 lepers managed by a warden, provided with monastic clothing and ample food upon the Abbey's expense in return for prayer. These lepers, probably coming from the poorest segments of medieval society, lived under similar restrictions to the monks, with some extra freedom in an allowance of 5d a month; they could not engage in sexual intercourse or leave the Hospital unaccompanied and their wealth was appropriated by the Abbey upon their death. The Hospital acted as an expression of the charity and piety of the Abbey and its abbot.

Through the 15th-century, with the reduced population, higher wages and greater hygiene as consequences of the Black Death, leper houses in England declined. By 1480, the Hospital had been demolished and its materials sold off, with its declining appeal and the abbot's financial abuses creating disapproval from the royal family. There exists no remaining above-ground evidence of the Hospital and scholars differ on its specific location, but it was likely positioned away from the town - to avoid the social stigmas and infectious nature of leprosy - and had ample land attached, for the use of the lepers.

St Laurence's Church
St Laurence's Church is a former parish church and Grade I listed building on the western boundary of the Abbey, just south of the Hospitium of St John and north of the Compter Gate. The Church predates to the Abbey, dating from around the Norman period, on land belonging to the Abbot of Battle as of the Domesday Book. It underwent significant rebuilding in 1196, after the foundation of the adjacent Hospitium and not long after the construction of the Abbey, extending the nave and demolishing the old tower. It was first attested by Hubert Walter in 1189-93. The saint of the Church's dedication, St Laurence, had something of a cult at Reading Abbey - with several feasts for and relics of St Laurence attested at the Abbey in the 12th-century. It survived the dissolution of the abbey, with some carved stones from the abbey resting in the churchyard. It underwent restoration under the expertise of local architect Joseph Morris between 1867 and 1869. On 10 Febuary 1943, during World War II, the Church underwent significant damage in a bombing raid. Due to declining congregation size over the 20th-century, the Church moved to become a Church of England mission for young people. The Church contains several historical specimens, including examples of early 12th-century sculpture in the nave of the Church, a 1522 font used to christen William Laud, and an elaborate monument to local mathematician John Blagrave, among other items.

Abbey Mill
The Abbey Mill is a ruined water mill structure, found on the former southern boundary of the Abbey. It was built along the Holy Brook, a channel of the River Kennet that flows through Reading. The natural stream was first exploited by the Abbey around the 12th-century, shown by excavations unearthing the original mill works; a well-endowed Abbey, such as Reading, would have been more likely to have the capital to finance the construction of the mill wheel and structure surrounding, at the time, than a private citizen. Disputes emerged with the townspeople for their use the stream, specifically the abbots condemnation of pollution from a local dye works. The mill continued to be in use well after the Abbey's dissolution, alongside other local millworks, and continued to grind corn until around 1959. The remains of the mill consist of a three arched rubble wall, patched with modern brick, running across the Brook.

Relics
In the 12th-century, the relics of an abbey were an integral part in cultivating its wealth and popularity, attracting lay attention and funding, as a social expression of a person's piety and devotion to the saints, alongside monks and pilgrims. Reading Abbey was not, as other English religious sites such as St Albans Cathedral or St Edmundsbury Cathedral were, constructed around some holy site or saint's burial place, and so had no advantage in acquiring these relics. Despite this, the Abbey managed to, in the course of less than a century from its founding, build up a collection of relics comparable to the largest collections in England. A c. 1190 cartulary of the abbey, BL Egerton 3031, gives a grand list of the Abbey's relics, totaling at 242 different relics in the possession of the abbey. The majority of these relics were donated by Henry, such as several improbable Biblical artifacts from Constantinople (including Christ's sandals, bread from the Last Supper, and the Virgin Mary's hair) and the Hand of St James. A similar list of Reading relics, made by commissioner John London on 18 September 1538 during the Abbey's dissolution, totalled at a meager 23 or 24 relics. Only two relics, a bone of Saint Osmund of unknown provenance and a head of Philip the Apostle) gifted by King John, are recorded as being endowed to the Abbey after the 1190 cartulary was formed.

Hand of St James
Tthe most famous relic in the Abbey's collection was the Hand of St James. The Hand was brought by Empress Matilda from the treasury of the Holy Roman Empire, where it had been since 1072, upon the death of her husband Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor in 1125. This was donated by her father, Henry I, at an indeterminate time between 1126 and 1133. The hand was taken from Reading Abbey shortly after Henry I's death by Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester but returned to Reading Abbey in 1155 upon Henry II's insistence. Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor made an attempt to get Henry to return the Hand to the German treasury in 1157, but he refused. Henry II went on to encourage a cult of the Hand at Reading, promoting pilgrimages and local festivals in celebration of St James. Many bishops during the 12th-century granted indulgences and feasts for St James at Reading, culminating in Pope Alexander III's exhortation of between 1173 and 1181 to visit Reading in commemoration of St James. By the 13th-century, 386 days of indulgences had been granted for St James at Reading. Several miracles were also associated with the Hand in Henry II's reign, often involving miraculous healings in the Reading townspeople. The Hand was stored in 3 different reliquaries during its time at the Abbey, the second of these was sold off by Richard I to fund his participation in the Third Crusade, leading to some tension with the Abbey's convent and possibly the Abbey's support for John, Count of Mortain (later King of England) in the Revolt of 1173–74.

The hand was stored at the abbey upon the dissolution, when London recorded it was still among the few relics remaining at the Abbey. During the demolition of the Abbey, the Hand, alongside many other relics of the Abbey, disappeared. This hand was allegedly discovered by a set of workers during construction of the Reading Gaol in October 1786, stowed away in an iron chest in the walls of the ruined Abbey. This hand was subsequently gifted to Reading Museum, sold to collector J. Scott Murray in 1840 for his private chapel in Danesfield House, and was gifted to St Peter's Church at Marlow, Buckinghamshire upon Murray's death.

Tomb of Henry I
Henry I, the founder of Reading Abbey, died at Normandy on 1 December 1135, was embalmed at Rouen and was finally buried at the Abbey on 5 January 1136. His tomb lay opposite the altar in the Abbey Church. The tomb became a central feature of the prestigious Abbey, with Henry's family elevating the status of Henry to that of a cult in the Abbey. Alongside Henry I, several other royal relations chose to be buried at the Abbey, including his wife Adeliza of Louvain, his illegitimate son Reginald and his great-grandson William, among others. In 1398, Richard II refused to confirm the Abbey's charter until the tomb had been restored. In the accounts of the dissolution of Reading Abbey in 1549, no report is given as to the specific fate of the tomb of Henry I, among the many monuments and gravestones taken by the townspeople for use in secular constructions.

After the dissolution, the tomb was lost. No undisputed depiction or reliable record of the appearance of the tomb survives, but several modern scholars have speculated based on contemporary evidence. Contemporary chronicler John of Worcester records the tomb was built in the "customary" or "fashionable" style, though few other contemporary royal tombs survive so this description is unhelpful. An 131 word contemporary poem of the monk Robert Partes survives as an elegy to the king, and it has been suggested this poem was inscribed on Henry's tomb, giving an approximate size of the stone; this idea has been criticized by historian Julian Luxford, who suggests the poem was more likely on a nearby plinth (similar to the tomb of Richard I at Rouen) or was entirely unrelated. The tomb was probably not originally an effigy as effigial royal tombs didn't occur in Britain until the early 13th-century, but renovations by Richard II likely added an effigial element. A 15th-century English marginal manuscript illustration depicts Henry's tomb and has been identified by Luxford as a possibly authentic illustration, probably based on the synthesis of the author's knowledge of Henry's tomb with tombs they were acquainted with, representing an effigial tomb in a French Gothic style. During restoration work at the Abbey in 2018, a stone slab was discovered buried in the Abbey Church which was initially identified as Henry's tomb, but further investigation proved it to be merely an altar slab.

The spot where the tomb of Henry I once lay is now marked by a small plaque in the south transept of the ruined Abbey Church.

Stone of the Coronation of the Virgin
The stone of the Coronation of the Virgin is a badly damaged Caen stone Reading Abbey capital dating to c. 1140 that has been identified as one of the earliest extant depictions of the Coronation of the Virgin, which later became a popular subject in medieval Christian art. The stone shows a crudely sculpted robed and crowned female figure seated on a bench-like object, adjacent to a badly damaged male figure, argued by Zarnecki to respectively represent the Virgin Mary and Jesus. The stone has been declared by Abbey patron, John Mullaney, "one of the most important pieces of medieval sculpture in England."

The stone was discovered at the Barn Acre Cottage, Borough Marsh near Wargrave by Romanesque art historian George Zarnecki during excavations in 1948. These excavations followed in the footsteps of excavations the antiquarian Charles Edward Keyser had planned to conduct in 1915, after he discovered six Reading capitals at Holme Park, Sonning and learned they had been taken from Borough Marsh. The excavations uncovered several carved Reading capitals, the most spectacular of these being the stone of the Coronation of the Virgin which was discovered resting under an oak tree. Before this discovery the earliest known depiction was an 1140-48 mosaic in Rome. Zarnecki published an account of these excavations in The Illustrated London News the following year, and an academic study of the capital and its provenance the year after.

Zarnecki conjectured in his study that the capital was a miniature version of a larger composition in the Abbey, possibly a tympanum similar to other early depictions of the Coronation. Such an innovation in iconography would have be unlikely to originate in a small capital, and the composition would be appropriate for the Abbey, being that the Abbey was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and, at the time of the Abbey's construction, Adeliza of Louvain (a dedicated patron of the Abbey and the arts) had recently been crowned queen. Since this discovery several other pieces have been proposed as earlier representations of the coronation, including a since-lost decoration at Worcester Cathedral of c. 1100.

Abbots
(arms of abbey, right)