Romsey

Romsey abbey was founded in the early tenth century, by King Edward the Elder. Eadflæd, Edward’s daughter by his second wife Ælfflæd, is said by William of Malmesbury (GR i. 136-7) to have entered the religious life and to have been buried at Wilton, but according to the compiler of the Liber Monasterii de Hyda (ed. Edwards, pp. 112-13), she was buried at Romsey; there may, however, be some confusion here with the later St Æthelflæd of Romsey.  King Edgar seems to have regarded Romsey with special affection: he is said to have ‘refounded’ the abbey in 967, appointing a certain Merewenna as its abbess, and entrusting Æthelflæd, daughter of his wife Ælfthryth by her first husband Æthelwold, to her care; he gave the royal estate at Edington, in Wiltshire, to the nuns in 968 (S 765), and Edmund, son of Edgar and Ælfthryth, was buried at Romsey in 971. 

<Names of abbesses of Romsey, and list of nuns, entered in the ‘Liber Vitae’ of the New Minster, Winchester.>  <Christina, sister of Edgar the ætheling, took the veil at Romsey in 1086.>

The extant charters of Romsey abbey comprise King Edgar’s grant of Steeple Ashton in Wiltshire to himself (S 727), his grant of Edington to Romsey (S 765), and a charter of privileges in the name of King Edgar (S 812).  <Cf. S 898.>

<Enlarge on S 812: Romsey’s spurious ‘Orthodoxorum’ charter, perhaps modelled on S 658, from Abingdon.>

A Romsey cartulary belonged to Sir Henry Spelman in 1606, but is untraced. (Davis, Medieval Cartularies [2010], no. 822.1, citing Rylands Library, MS, Lat. 318, fol. 127.)

The Romsey charters are preserved in the late-fourteenth-century cartulary of the collegiate church of Edington (BL Lansdowne 442 (Davis 355)); see Edington Cartulary, ed. Stevenson, pp. 24-5 (nos. 45-7).  In the mid-fourteenth century William of Edington (bishop of Winchester, 1346-66) had prevailed on the abbess and convent of Romsey to sell him their land at Edington, using it for the foundation and endowment of a new chantry at Edington itself; and it was evidently in this connection that copies of the Romsey charters were transferred to Edington.

Charters of Romsey Abbey

Royal diplomas.  727; 765; 812.

Select bibliography

WM, GP, pp. 174-5; Mon. Angl. i. 219-20; Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.) ii. 506-10; VCH Hants. ii. 126-32; MRH, p. 264; HRH, pp. 218-19.

• D. K. Coldicott, Hampshire Nunneries (Chichester, 1989)
• C. R. Collier, ‘Romsey Minster in Saxon Times’, Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society 46 (1991), pp. 41-52
• H. G. D. Liveing, Records of Romsey Abbey (Winchester, 1906)
• The Edington Cartulary, ed. J. H. Stevenson, Wiltshire Record Soc. 42 (Devizes, 1987)
• Ian R. Scott, Romsey Abbey, Hampshire Field Club Monograph 8 (1996)
• Ann Williams, 'The speaking cross, the persecuted princess, and the murdered earl: the early history of Romsey Abbey', Anglo-Saxon 1 (2007), 221-38