Abbotsbury

Abbotsbury abbey was founded in the second quarter of the eleventh century, by a Dane called Orc (Urkir).  Orc was one of the several followers of Cnut who appear to have established themselves (or to have been established by the king) in the south-west, perhaps in Dorset in particular: he had received a grant of land at Portesham, near Abbotsbury, in 1024 (S 961), and like Agemund of Cheselbourne (S 955) and Bovi of Horton (S 969) he may have been one of those who benefited from the renders ad opus huscarlium levied from the four Dorset boroughs of Dorchester, Bridport, Wareham and Shaftesbury (GDB 75r).  Orc and his wife Tola are said to have given various estates to an older church of St Peter at Abbotsbury; but in 1044 Orc founded the monastery there, introduced monks from Cerne abbey, and secured a charter of confirmation from King Edward the Confessor.  Orc was also responsible for organising members of the lay society around Abbotsbury into a formal guild, governed by rules which set the minster and its good works at the centre of their attention, and which also brought them the assurance of the fitting obsequies they so earnestly desired (S (Add.) GR4); it was presumably in this way that Orc sought to bind the local society together, and to ensure the continued prosperity of his church.

Following the dissolution of Abbotsbury abbey in 1539, its estates and muniments were acquired by Sir Giles Strangways, of Melbury Sampford, Dorset.  The muniments included a number of pre-Conquest charters in single-sheet form, and a cartulary (Davis 1).  The cartulary was lost during the Civil War, probably when the Strangways’ house at Melbury was ransacked in 1644; but its contents can be reconstructed to some extent from the writings of antiquaries active in the first half of the seventeenth century.  Thomas Gerard used material from a ‘Register’ of Abbotsbury in his ‘Survey of Dorsetshire’, written in the 1620s; Sir Henry Spelman cites extracts from the Abbotsbury charters to illustrate pre-Conquest conditions of land tenure, in his tract on ‘Feuds and Tenures by Knight-Service in England’; and Sir William Dugdale supplies information about Abbotsbury apparently derived from the cartulary and transmitted to him by its then owner, Sir John Strangways.  The cartulary appears to have contained the texts of at least 13 pre-Conquest charters, including a number of tenth- and eleventh-century title-deeds for estates which came to form part of the abbey’s endowment; it also contained an account of the foundation of the abbey, and lists of benefactors.

Extracts from six of the charters in the lost cartulary can be recovered from the manuscripts of Spelman’s tract; see Keynes, 'Lost Cartulary', pp. 225-34.  The two writs of Edward the Confessor, in favour of Orc and Tola respectively, were incorporated in an Inspeximus charter of Edward II, and their texts are thus transmitted in the charter rolls.  Five of the single-sheet charters survived the vicissitudes of the Civil War, and remained in the possession of the Fox-Strangways family (Earls of Ilchester), at Melbury House; they are now deposited in the Dorset County Record Office at Dorchester.

Charters of Abbotsbury

Royal diplomas.  736, 961, 1004.  Extracts from six other royal diplomas (from the lost cartulary): S (Add.) 1602a, 1602b, 1602c, 1602d, 1602e, 1602h.  See also S (Add.) 1602g.

Writs.  1063; 1064.

Miscellaneous.  S (Add.) 1602f.

Others.  S (Add.) GR4.

Select bibliography

Mon. Angl. i. 276-82; Not. Mon. (Dorset), no. I; Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.) iii. 52-61; VCH Dorset ii. 48-53 and iii. 44; MRH, p. 58; HRH, p. 23.

Harmer, Writs, pp. 119-22; S. Keynes, ‘The Lost Cartulary of Abbotsbury’, ASE 18 (1989), pp. 207-43.

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October 2011