Pershore

A monastery at Pershore is said to have been founded c. 689 by Oswald, nephew of Æthelred, king of the Mercians, and brother of Osric, founder of St Peter’s, Gloucester.  This statement depends on a set of annals (displaying a particular interest in both Evesham and Pershore) apparently compiled in the late fourteenth century, seen by Leland in the sixteenth century (Collectanea i. 240-53), and now lost.  Nothing is known of the history of the abbey in the mid-Saxon period, beyond the fact that it appears to have received a charter of privileges from King Coenwulf of Mercia (796-821), at the instigation of Ealdorman Beornnoth (see S 786); and it is otherwise assumed that the abbey was destroyed by the vikings during the course of the ninth century.  Monastic life seems to have been re-established at Pershore during the reign of King Edgar (an act accredited by William of Malmesbury to a certain Æthelweard, ‘ealdorman of Dorset’).  The first abbot of the new foundation was Foldbriht, who attests charters from c. 970; this Foldbriht is doubtless the person of that name who had followed Æthelwold from Glastonbury to Abingdon in the 950s (Wulfstan, Vita S. Æthelwoldi, ch. 11).  According to the annals cited by Leland, the abbey was much afflicted by a wicked earl ‘Delfer’, and subsequently prospered under ‘Delfer’’s ‘successor’, Earl Odda.  ‘Delfer’ is evidently to be identified as Ælfhere, ealdorman of Mercia (956-83); and one imagines that the reference is to his role in the so-called ‘anti-monastic reaction’ of the later 970s (ASC, s.a. 975).  Odda was made earl of the western provinces in 1051-2, but following Godwine’s restoration he seems to have acquired interests in the west midlands (and was the builder of ‘Odda’s Chapel’, at Deerhurst, in Gloucestershire); he died in 1056, and was buried at Pershore (ASC).  It has been suggested that Odda may have succeeded, in some way, to lands which Ealdorman Ælfhere had previously appropriated from Pershore, and that it was in consequence of his death without heir that King Edward the Confessor was able to grant substantial estates centred on Pershore and Deerhurst to his abbey of Westminster (see Round, in VCH Worcs. i. 257-61).  In 1077, at the instigation of Bishop Wulfstan II of Worcester, the community of Pershore entered into association with the communities of Evesham, Chertsey, Bath, Winchcombe, Gloucester and Worcester (P 78).  See WM, GP, p. 298; Mon. Angl. i. 203-8; Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.) ii. 410-26; VCH Worcs. ii. 127-36; MRH, p. 73; HRH, pp. 58-9.  See also Harmer, Writs, pp. 330-2; D. Hooke, Worcestershire Anglo-Saxon Charter-Bounds (Woodbridge, 1990), pp. 177-230; and Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, pp. 94-6 and 398-9.

<Dispute between Pershore/Worcester and Westminster?  Robertson, Charters, pp. 456-8, on Odda and Pershore.>

A charter, dated 972, by which King Edgar granted certain privileges to Pershore abbey, and confirmed its possession of numerous estates amounting to more than 300 hides in Worcestershire and Gloucestershire, is preserved in single-sheet form (S 786).  The charter was probably produced at Pershore in the late tenth or first half of the eleventh century, in an attempt to stake the abbey’s claim to an endowment which would match Worcester’s triple Hundred of Oswaldslaw; and there is reason to believe that the draftsman of the charter was making use for his own purposes of material supplied from Abingdon (cf. S 658 and 673, which were based in turn on S 876).  Edgar’s charter seems to have been transferred subsequently from Pershore to Worcester.  It served as the direct model for what must have been a crude Worcester forgery (S 788 = Somers Charter no. 16, described by Wanley as a ‘copy’ (exemplum)); it appears to have been used at Worcester in the mid-twelfth century, in an attempt to restore Pershore’s fortunes (letter from Godfrey, archdeacon of Worcester, to the pope, in BL Cotton Augustus ii. 7); and it was apparently at Worcester when copied by Joscelyn in the sixteenth century (BL Cotton Vitellius D. vii, 29r-30v [SEE STOKES 2008]).  It should also be noted that the letter of Archdeacon Godfrey is said to have been appensum to the Pershore charter, when the letter was copied in the later sixteenth century (see Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS. 111, p. 135).

<Bounds of Acton Beauchamp in BL Cotton Tiberius A. xiii.  Context of Aug. ii. 7?>

It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that there is no copy of King Edgar’s charter in the surviving cartulary of Pershore abbey, compiled in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (PRO, E 315/61 (Davis 753)).  <Charter of King Æthelred for Ealdorman Leofwine (S 932).>

Royal diplomas.  786; 932.

P. Stokes, ‘King Edgar’s Charter for Pershore (AD 972)’, ASE 37 (2008), 31–78.