This thesis offers the first dedicated study of each of the three crown-wearing abbeys of Westminster, Winchester, and Gloucester between c.1100 and 1170 across their records and creative writings. In doing so this study provides new insight into three important and politically symbolic abbeys.
This was a period which witnessed both contested monarchy and a surge in new monasticism that challenged the primacy of pre-Conquest Benedictine abbeys such as these. This study provides new findings into these circumstances by showing how English monarchy interacted with these abbeys in a time when royalty itself was insecure. It also reconstructs the fates of three ancient communities within England's rapidly changing religious landscape. Finally, this thesis also analyses different types of texts produced at these abbeys in this period, including hagiography, forged charters, and cartulary. The original findings from each of these texts are compared and contextualised, providing further insight into these communities and how they responded to the challenges of their present.
This thesis analyses each abbey and its writings in turn. The first chapter investigates Westminster Abbey. In the chapter's first section, charters are used to reconstruct the abbey's fortunes and activities across the period. With this context established, the second section investigates Osbert of Clare's Vita Eadwardi, and the third assesses the abbey's twelfth-century forged charters, a small corpus of which were also written by Osbert. In the fourth section of this chapter the findings from the different types of writing are considered together.
A similar methodology is followed in the second chapter on Winchester Cathedral Priory, where the materials are again charters, and hagiography (in this case the anonymous Vita Birini, Vita Swithuni, and Miracula Swithuni, and a cartulary known as the Codex Wintoniensis. At Gloucester Abbey the writings are charters, forged charters, and Benedict of Gloucester's Vita Dubricii.
