CHAPTER XXXIV
BARDNEY ABBEY
The Excavations—The Title “Dominus”—Barlings—Stainfield—Tupholme—Stixwould—Kirkstead Abbey—Kirkstead Chapel—Woodhall Spa—Tower-on-the-Moor—Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk.
The fens were always a difficulty to the various conquerors of England, and, probably owing to the security which they gave, they, from the earliest times, attracted the monastic bodies. Hence we find on the eastern edge of the Branston, Nocton, and Blankney fens, and just off the left bank of the Witham river when it turns to the south, an extraordinary number of abbeys. For Kirkstead, Stixwould, Tupholme and Bardney, with Stainfield and Barlings just a mile or two north of the river valley, are all within a ten mile drive. Of these, Kirkstead was Cistercian, and Stixwould and Stainfield were nunneries. They were all most ruthlessly and utterly destroyed by Thomas Cromwell at the dissolution, so it is only the history of them that we can speak about.
Kirkstead Chapel.
Stixwould and Kirkstead were originally as much in the fen as Bardney; but since the “Dales Head Dyke” was cut parallel with the Witham and about a mile to the west from “Metheringham Delph” to “Billinghay Skirth,” the land between it and the river is known as the “Dales.”
ST. OSWALD
A ROYAL ABBOT
By far the oldest and the biggest and most interesting of the group was the great Benedictine Abbey of Bardney. This was founded not later than the seventh century. Some of the chronicles say by Æthelred, son of Penda, the pagan king of Mercia; but it may have been by his brother Wulfhere, who reigned before him. Æthelred’s Queen Osfrida, niece of the sainted Oswald, the Northumbrian king who had defeated Cædwalla at Hevenfield in 635 and was himself killed in battle by Penda at Maserfield in 642—had before her marriage brought the relics of her uncle in 672 to Bardney, where they became the centre of attraction for pilgrims, and St. Oswald’s name as patron was added to those of St. Peter and St. Paul to whom the abbey was dedicated. Osfrida herself having been murdered by the Danes in 697, was buried here, and Æthelred, who in 701 founded Evesham Abbey, following the example of half-a-dozen Anglian and Saxon kings, gave up his throne after a reign of thirty years and entered Bardney as a monk in 704. In the quaint words of the chronicle he “was shorn a religious,” i.e., adopted the tonsure, and died twelve years later, after ruling for four years as Abbot of Bardney. One of the frescoes in Friskney church represents him resigning his crown to become a monk. St. Oswald’s arm, which had been preserved in St. Peter’s church at Bamborough, and which never withered, was afterwards transferred to Peterborough Abbey, according to Gunton, a little before the Conquest. A monk of the period wrote the following lines about it:—
“Nullo verme perit, nulla putredine tabet