Shaftesbury | Kemble

Shaftesbury abbey was founded by King Alfred the Great, probably in the late 880s, near the east gate of the burh which the king had established a few years previously at the same place; the king entrusted the abbey to the control of his daughter Æthelgifu (Asser, Vita Alfredi regis, ch. 98), and was later believed to have endowed it with estates amounting to 100 hides (S 357; Passio S. Eadwardi, p. 9). There is reason to believe that Shaftesbury prospered throughout the tenth century, that it retained its Alfredian identity as a house particularly associated with the royal family, and that it continued to offer sanctuary to women drawn from the upper echelons of West Saxon society (whether as full members of the community, or as associates of some kind who took religious vows at a relatively late stage in their life). <S 562: Eadgifu, famula Dei.> Queen Ælfgifu, wife of King Edmund and mother of Kings Eadwig and Edgar, died c. 944 and was buried at Shaftesbury; she soon came to be venerated as a saint, and many miracles were reported at her tomb (Lantfred, Translatio et miracula S. Swithuni, ch. 36; Chronicon Æthelweardi, IV.6). When Edgar’s son, King Edward the Martyr, was murdered at Corfe, on 18 March 978, his body was promptly destroyed or concealed; nearly a year later it was miraculously revealed, whereupon it was taken initially to Wareham (13 February) and translated thence to Shaftesbury (18 February 979); on 20 June 1001 the king’s remains were moved from their resting-place north of the principal altar to a more fitting place in the sanctuary of the church. The presence at Shaftesbury of the relics of King Edward the Martyr was an important element in the abbey’s identity thereafter. It is evident that King Æthelred himself was instrumental in the promotion of the cult of his half-brother, for a few months after the translation of Edward’s relics in 1001 he granted the minster at Bradford-on-Avon, in Wiltshire, to the abbey and community of Shaftesbury, ‘so that the same religious community, with the relics of the blessed martyr and of other saints, may obtain there a refuge from the inroads of barbarians, and serve God undisturbed’ (S 899); if peace returned, the nuns were to return to their abbey, but they were enjoined to leave a small part of the community at Bradford to maintain divine services there. In 1008 it was ordained that ‘St Edward’s mass-day shall be celebrated throughout England on 18 March’ (V Æthelred, ch. 16). On his deathbed in 1014 the ætheling Æthelstan bequeathed money ‘to the Holy Cross and to St Edward at Shaftesbury’ (S 1503); the reference here to the ‘Holy Cross’ suggests that among the other relics venerated at Shaftesbury was a fragment of the True Cross, conceivably that known to have been sent by Pope Marinus to King Alfred in 883. In view of the evidence for the settlement of several of Cnut’s Danish followers in Dorset (above, pp. 000 and 000), it is interesting that it was at Shaftesbury that the king died, on 12 November 1035; he was buried at the Old Minster, Winchester. By the close of the Anglo-Saxon period, Shaftesbury had accumulated estates to a total assessment of over 350 hides in Dorset, Wiltshire and elsewhere.

<Suppression: Bettey, p. 138.> Following the dissolution of Shaftesbury abbey in 1539, many of the abbey’s estates were acquired by Sir Thomas Arundell, of Wardour Castle, Tisbury (Wilts.). In the early seventeenth century, the Pitt family of Dorset seem to have had occasion to search the archives of their neighbours for evidence of ancient rights: notes were taken on their behalf from ‘the Register booke of the Abbey of Shafton w[hich] remaines at thevidence house in Warder Castle’ (BL Add. 29976, 13r), citing a text from ‘fol. 482’ of the cartulary in question; and it emerges from another note in a Shaftesbury connection that ‘The Lord Arundell of Wardour hath the legier booke and diuers auntiente writings’ (BL Add. 29976, 17r). The references would appear to be to a particularly substantial Shaftesbury cartulary, and to a quantity of charters in single-sheet form; but the cartulary (Davis 888) and the charters are lost, presumed destroyed when Wardour Castle was ransacked by parliamentary forces in May 1643 (The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, ed. C. H. Firth, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1894) i. 66-7 and 447-51). One can but register a number of other references to manuscripts which may or may not have contained material bearing on the pre-Conquest history of Shaftesbury abbey: a ‘cartularium de Shafton.’ was reported to be in the hands of the Trustees of Sir John Lowe, of Shaftesbury, in 1680 (Tanner); another was reported to be in the hands of Thomas Schutz, of Shotover in Oxfordshire (Collectanea Topographica et Genealogica 2 (1835), p. 106); and a ‘Calendar. donationum’ belonged to Giles Templeman, of the Inner Temple, in 1822 (ibid.). <Aubrey.>

There could be no guarantee, of course, that any of the ‘lost’ cartularies of Shaftesbury were older than those which have chanced to survive; but they serve to remind us that we may well be dependent on manuscripts which represent only the tail-end of archival activity at the abbey. BL Egerton 3135 (Davis 886) is a cartulary compiled in the early fifteenth century, relating to lands given to the abbey c. 1400 for the endowment of a chantry (Collins, ‘Chartulary of Shaftesbury Abbey’); it does not contain any pre-Conquest documentation. BL Harley 61 (Davis 885), compiled at about the same time, is a collection of documents pertaining to the abbey’s estates in general; for a complete list of its contents, see Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.) ii. 474-<000>. Harley 61 begins with a series of about thirty pre-Conquest charters (fols. 1-22), not arranged in any discernible order but clearly the product of a conscious attempt to assemble the title-deeds which had accumulated in the abbey’s archive in the process of its endowment. The charter of King Æthelred which served as the title-deed for the abbey’s major estate at Bradford-on-Avon (S 899) is accorded pride of place, followed by the title-deed for Tisbury (S 850); five other charters cast directly in favour of the abbey (two in the name of King Æthelstan, and one each in the names of Kings Eadwig and Edgar) occur at various points further on, and the series ends with the (spurious) ‘foundation’ charter of King Alfred (S 357). The great majority of the charters record grants to other parties, and served as title-deeds for estates which came at one time or another into the abbey’s possession; five date from the ninth century, sixteen from the tenth, and one from the eleventh. Two much earlier charters (S 1164 and 1256, in fact constituting a single conflate text) concern land at Fontmell in Dorset which belonged to a minster at Tisbury; it is not clear whether they represent title-deeds which passed to Shaftesbury when the abbey aquired land at Fontmell from King Æthelstan (S 419), or whether they form an ‘archive’ acquired when Tisbury was itself given to the abbey, also in the tenth century (see Keynes 1992, pp. 81-3). In short, the Shaftesbury archive presents the kind of profile which one might expect of an abbey which prospered under royal and noble patronage in the later Anglo-Saxon period; the texts of the charters are sometimes corrupt to an extent which suggests that they are more than one stage removed from the originals, but there can be no doubt that most of them are fundamentally sound.

It should be noted that the compiler of Harley 61 may have chosen to restrict herself (or himself) to formal title-deeds, perhaps to the exclusion of ‘private’ documents such as vernacular wills; and the possibility should be mentioned in this connection that the will of Wynflæd (S 1539: BL Cotton Charter viii. 38) represents the unique survival of a pre-Conquest single sheet from the Shaftesbury archive. Wynflæd was a widow of considerable means, who had formed an association with an unnamed religious community; it has been suggested that the community in question was that of Shaftesbury abbey (Whitelock, Wills, p. 109), in which case one might assume that Wynflæd’s will was preserved in the Shaftesbury archive. The suggestion depends to some extent on the presumption that Wynflæd can be identified as the ‘religious woman’ called Wynflæd who in 942 received a charter from King Edmund in respect of land at Cheselbourne in Dorset (S 485), and as the Wynflæd mentioned in another charter as King Edgar’s grandmother, known to have been a benefactress of Shaftesbury abbey (S 744). It is quite likely indeed that the Wynflæd of S 485 was none other than King Edgar’s grandmother; and it would follow that King Edmund’s mother-in-law had formed a particular association with the community at Shaftesbury, providing an obvious context for the burial of her daughter, Queen Ælfgifu, at the abbey. But while it might be considered desirable to roll all three Wynflæds into one, it has to be said that the will does not contain any reference to a daughter called Ælfgifu (whether still alive or already dead), and that it does not read as if it were the last testament of a person so intimately connected with the royal family. It remains possible, of course, that the will is that of a second Wynflæd associated with Shaftesbury; it is also possible that it is the will of a Wynflæd associated with any one of an unknown number of lesser minsters in Wessex, and that it came from an archive exposed to the acquisitive attentions of a passing antiquary in the seventeenth century.

An inventory of the muniments of Shaftesbury abbey was begun in the year 1500, under the auspices of Abbess Margery Twynyho (1496-1505), and was completed a few years later; it survives as BL Egerton 3098 (Davis 887), described by Bell, ‘Register of Deeds from Shaftesbury Abbey’. The account of the background to the compilation of the inventory, given in the preface (trans. ibid., pp. 19-20), is most instructive. Abbess Margery was fearful that the abbey’s ability to defend its rights and privileges was compromised by the haphazard state of the muniments: ‘for all the liberties, privileges, and muniments of this aforesaid noble monastery had been preserved in the treasury not arranged by manors, according to their order as it is clearly shown below, but very confusedly, in diverse chests and boxes, in such manner that if search had to be made for any liberty, privilege, or muniment, great or small, which was required for the good of the monastery, none knew for certain whether any such muniment could be produced or no, and, if it could, in which chest or box it was to be found …’ Eventually the abbess took advice from her brother, Christopher Twynyho (the abbey’s steward), and employed Alexander Katour (sacristan) to re-organize the contents of all the chests and boxes, and to compile a register of them. The inventory does not appear to include any of the documents transcribed in Harley 61; it would seem to follow that the originals of many of the abbey’s charters had been lost or destroyed by the end of the fifteenth century, though of course it is possible that Katour had chosen to restrict himself to certain categories of documents, leaving others aside.

Charters of Shaftesbury

Edition: Charters of Shaftesbury, ed. S. Kelly (Oxford, 1995).

Royal diplomas. 277; 326; 329; 334; 342; 357; 419; 429; 445; 459; 478; 485; 490; 502; 534; 562; 570; 573; 630; 632; 655; 656; 710; 730; 744; 762; 850; 899; 955.

Writs. See 1868.

Miscellaneous. 1164; 1256.

Select bibliography

WM, GP, pp. 186-8; Mon. Angl. i. 213-17 and 983; Not. Mon. (Dorset), no. XXIII; Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.) ii. 471-88; VCH Dorset ii. 73-9 and iii. 42-3; MRH, p. 265; HRH, p. 219.

H. I. Bell, ‘A Register of Deeds from Shaftesbury Abbey’, British Museum Quarterly 8 (1933-4), pp. 18-22
A. J. Collins, ‘A Chartulary of Shaftesbury Abbey’, British Museum Quarterly 10 (1935-6), pp. 66-8
C. E. Fell, Edward King and Martyr (Leeds, 1971) - edition of the Passio Sancti Eadwardi regis et martyris
C. E. Fell, ‘Edward King and Martyr and the Anglo-Saxon Hagiographic Tradition’, Ethelred the Unready, ed. D. Hill, BAR British ser. 59 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 1-13
Ridyard, Royal Saints, pp. 44-50 and 154-75 - development of the cult of St Edward
Edwards, Charters of the Early West Saxon Kingdom, pp. 228-36
K. Cooke, ‘Donors and Daughters: Shaftesbury Abbey’s Benefactors, Endowments and Nuns c. 1086-1130’, Anglo-Norman Studies 12 (1989), pp. 29-45, on post-Conquest additions to the endowment