Whatever happened to Bury’s books, it is certain that the room which still serves as a library was built in 1417, and it may be taken to form, happily enough, the connecting link between the old monastic house and the modern Trinity College. Some fragments of the original “Domus et clausura” may also survive in the Old Bursary and Common Room.
The stimulating effect of the friars upon the old Orders is shown also by the foundation of Rewley Abbey, of which the main entrance was once north-west of Hythe Bridge Street. Rewley (Locus Regalis in North Osney) was built for the Cistercians.
Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III., who like the King had often been at Oxford, directed in his will that a foundation should be endowed for three secular priests to pray for his soul. His son Edmund, however, founded an Abbey of regulars instead, Cistercian monks from Thame. He gave sixteen acres to the west of the Abbey for walks and for private use. To represent the twenty-one monks of the foundation, twenty-one elm-trees were planted within the gates, and at the upper end a tree by itself to represent the abbot. It was to this Abbey, then, that the Cistercian monks came up to study, till Archbishop Chichele founded S. Bernard’s for them (1437). The college which Chichele founded for the Bernardines, the “Black” Cistercians who followed the reformed rule of S. Bernard, was built on the east side of S. Giles’, “after the same
mode and fashion for matters of workmanship as his college of All Souls.” It is the modern college of S. John Baptist. But a large part of the buildings date from Chichele’s foundation, and the statue of S. Bernard still stands in its original niche to recall to the modern student the Bernardines whom he has succeeded.
The Abbey was dissolved by Henry VIII., who gave the site to the Cathedral of Christ Church. The ruins were still standing in Wood’s day, “seated within pleasant groves and environed with clear streams.” Only a fragment of a wall and doorway now remain. A memorial stone, purchased from the site of Rewley by Hearne the Antiquarian for half a crown, is preserved in the Ashmolean. It bears the name of Ella Longepée, the benevolent Countess of Warwick, “who made this chapel.”
In addition to the numerous parish churches and convents and colleges, there were now innumerable smaller religious foundations in Oxford. There was the House of Converts; there were several hospitals and hermitages and “Ancherholds”—solitary little cells and cabins standing in the fields and adjoining abbeys or parish churches.