Osney Abbey

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Osney Abbey or Oseney Abbey was a house of Augustinian canons at Osney, west of Oxford, England. It was founded as a priory in 1129, becoming an abbey around 1154 and being dissolved in 1539, the last abbot Robert King becoming the first Bishop of Oxford. It was one of the four renowned monastic houses of medieval Oxford, along with St Frideswide's, Rewley and Godstow. The abbey church stood on the site in New Osney now occupied by Osney cemetery, which lies next to the railway line just south of Oxford station.

The house was founded by Robert D'Oyly, Norman governor of Oxford, prompted by his wife, Edith Forne, who, to expiate the sins of her former life as the mistress of Henry I, solicited her husband to this pious work with a story of the chattering of magpies interpreted by a friar as souls in purgatory who needed a church in which to rest.

Edith was buried in Osney Abbey, in a religious habit, as John Leland describes upon seeing her tomb as it was on the eve of the dissolution: ‘Ther lyeth an image of Edith, of stone, in th' abbite of a vowess, holding a hart in her right hand, on the north side of the high altaire’. The legendary dream of magpies was painted near the tomb.

Osney was (along with St Osyth, Cirencester, Llanthony, and Holy Trinity, London), one of the great Augustinian houses of medieval England. It provided six of the canons of Henry II’s re-foundation of the Church of the Holy Cross, Waltham as an Augustinian house in 1177. When Waltham became an abbey in 1184, the first abbot was a canon of Osney.

In 1199, the church of St George in Oxford Castle was translated and annexed to the abbey. The most significant event in the history of the abbey came in April 1222 when a provincial council met there, charged with applying the Lateran decrees in England. When in July 1237, the papal legate Otto Cardinal Candidus came to Osney, a brawl broke out between a group of scholars from the university and the cardinal's men in which the legate's cook was killed. Otto himself was locked for safety in the abbey tower, emerging unscathed to lay the city under inderdict in reprisal.

After the abbey's dissolution in 1539, it was briefly the seat of the new Bishops of Oxford but the see transferred to the new foundation of Christ Church in 1545. It has been described as the greatest building Oxford has lost. Great Tom, the bell described as the 'loudest thing in Oxford', now hanging in Tom Tower at Christ Church, was taken from the tower of Osney Abbey on its dissolution. A good deal of the monastic property was also transferred to Christ Church, and the remains of the abbey remained as a source of building material for the city until Charles I exhausted the remainder during the Civil War.

[edit] Pictures

Detail of Abbey Ruins in 1640 [1].
Abbey plaque for remembrance of Robert of Reading, a Jew who died for his faith [2].

[edit] References

David Knowles and R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses of England and Wales (London: Longman, 1971)
George Lipscomb, The History and Antiquities of the County of Buckingham (1847)
Jan Morris, Oxford, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
W. A. Pantin, 'The Fourteenth Century' in The English Church and the Papacy in the Middle Ages, ed by C. H. Lawrence (Stroud, Gloucs.: Sutton, 1999 (1965))
Maurice Powicke, Stephen Langton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928)