St Eorcenwold founded an abbey (evidently a double house) at Barking for his sister Æthelburh, and a monastery at Chertsey for himself, some time before he became bishop of London (in 675); see Bede, HE iv. 6. It emerges from the (lost) Life of St Æthelburh, used by Bede, HE iv. 7-11, that Barking was already in existence at the time of the plague in 664, and that the community was still thriving under Æthelburh’s successor Hildelith in the early eighth century. Little is known of its history in the later eighth and ninth centuries. There was a community at Barking in the mid-tenth century. <St Wulfhild and Barking; see under Wilton.> <Two charters from the Barking archive (S (Add.) 65a-b) relate to the foundation and endowment of a religious house at Nazeing, Essex, in the late seventh or early eighth century, and thus provide an historical context for archaeological evidence revealing the existence of a Middle Saxon cemetery at Nazeingbury; it would appear that this house, and its archives, passed at some stage into the control of Barking abbey.>
<Notes by Prise on single sheets.> Two single-sheet charters were transcribed <at Barking> in the first half of the sixteenth century, by John Joscelyn (London, BL Cotton Vespasian A. ix, fols. 112-14); one survives (S 1171), but the other (S 1246) is lost (and so is known only from the transcript). An estate at Battersea which had formerly belonged to Barking abbey was given to Westminster abbey during the reign of William I, and it would appear that a charter representing Barking’s title to the land passed to Westminster at the same time; this charter underlies a late-eleventh-century single sheet written and preserved at Westminster (S 1248). For an edition of these three charters, see Hart, Early Charters of Barking, and ECEE, pp. 117-45.
Copies of nine Anglo-Saxon charters pertaining to the endowment of Barking abbey occur in the so-called ‘Vellum Book’ of Ilford Hospital (Hatfield House, MS. Ilford Hospital 1/6); see Lockwood, ‘One Thing Leads to Another’, and Bascombe, ‘Two Charters’, p. 85. Ilford Hospital was founded c. 1140 by Adeliza, abbess of Barking, as a refuge for lepers and other infirm. Following the dissolution of Barking abbey in 1539, the patronage of the hospital passed into private hands, including J. Vaughan (Master of the Hospital from 1558 until 1577), and Godfrey Fanshawe (Master by 1586); the patronage was later in the hands of the Gascoyne family of Barking, and following the marriage in 1821 of Frances, daughter and heiress of Bamber Gascoyne, to James Cecil, 2nd Marquis of Salisbury, some part of the muniments of Ilford Hospital were transferred into the custody of the Cecil family at Hatfield House. It would appear that in 1586 a dispute had arisen between Godfrey Fanshawe and a certain William Caroe over the payment of tithes from Eastbury, and that in 1590 a similar dispute arose between William Fisher (custodian of the Hospital) and one Thomas Wight over the payment of tithes from Barking marsh (both disputes reported in Barking & Dagenham Public Library, Valence Reference Library, MS. ‘Fisher v. Wite - Tithes of North Grange 1590-3’). It emerges from the account of the second dispute that James Armourer, formerly a servant of J. Vaughan, submitted as evidence a transcript which he had made in 1572 ‘out of a more ancient writing which was somewhat defaced, by commandment of Mr Vaughan’; and it is this transcript which survives as Hatfield House, MS. Ilford Hospital 1/6, fols. 1-27. One of the charters copied by Armourer is said to have been taken ‘e magno registro Barking’; so it would appear that his source was a cartulary of Barking abbey which presumably existed among the muniments of Ilford Hospital in the later sixteenth century, but which is now lost.
<Lockwood, in Transactions of the Ilford and District Historical Soc. 00 (1973). RH: Manorial records passed to Hulse family of Breamore House, Wilts; now in Essex RO. ‘Vellum Book’ used in 1734 by Smart Lethieullier, for his ‘History of Barking’; MS. of this work still at Breamore; microfilm printout in Essex RO (T/P 93/1-3), ii. 153.>
Two records pertaining to the abbey’s estates were added on the last leaf of a gospel-book (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 155 (Ker, Catalogue, no. 303)), presumably at Barking: one is a (vernacular) list of the land held and dues paid by a certain Gilbert at Stifford in Essex (see Hart, Early Charters of Essex: the Norman Period, pp. 25-7), and the other is a copy of a (Latin) chirograph in the name of Abbess Ælfgifu.
Charters of Barking abbey
Edition: Charters of Barking Abbey (in preparation)
Royal diplomas. 1171. S (Add.) 65a, 65b, 418a, 517a, 517b, 522a, 552a, 931a, 931b.
Miscellaneous. 1246. See also 1248 (preserved at Westminster).
Select bibliography
WM, GP, pp. 143-4; Mon. Angl. i. 79-83; Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.) i. 436-46; VCH Essex ii. 115-22; MRH, p. 256; HRH, p. 208.
- K. Bascombe, ‘Two Charters of King Suebred of Essex’, An Essex Tribute, ed. K. Neale (London, 1987), pp. 85-96;
- C. Hart, The Early Charters of Barking Abbey (Colchester, 1953);
- C. Hart, The Early Charters of Essex: the Norman Period (Leicester, 1957);
- Hart, ECEE, pp. 117-45;
- M. Lapidge and M. Herren, Aldhelm: the Prose Works (Ipswich, 1979), pp. 51-2;
- H. H. Lockwood, Where was the First Barking Abbey?, Barking and District Historical Society Transactions, ns 1 (Ilford, 1986);
- H. H. Lockwood, ‘One Thing Leads to Another - The Discovery of Additional Charters of Barking Abbey’, Essex Journal 25 (Spring 1990), pp. 11-13;
- H. H. Lockwood and J. Howson, Barking Abbey 1300th Anniversary: an Exhibition at Barking Central Library (1966).
Roy Hart died in April 2012.
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