St John's Abbey, Colchester
St John's Abbey, also called Colchester Abbey, was a Benedictine monastic institution in Colchester, Essex, founded in 1095. It was dissolved in 1539. Most of the abbey buildings were subsequently demolished to construct a large private house on the site, which was itself destroyed in fighting during the 1648 siege of Colchester. The only substantial remnant is the elaborate gatehouse, while the foundations of the abbey church were only rediscovered in 2010.
History
Founding
The site of the abbey, to the south of the walled part of the town near the road to Mersea Island, was originally the location of a Saxon church dedicated to either St John the Baptist or St John the Evangelist. This church was supposedly where "miraculous voices" could be heard. The Saxon church was excavated in the 1970s, and was revealed to be a three celled structure built from Roman rubble. Originally it was thought that the church began life as a Late Roman martyrium, although it was later concluded that this was an error based on the fact that the church had been built on a former Roman cemetery, rather than as part of it. The final priest of the church was a man called Siric or Sigeric at the time of the Domesday Survey. Following the Norman conquest of England in 1066 the town eventually came into the possession of Eudo Dapifer, steward of William I and King William II. Eudo claimed to have witnessed a miracle at St John's Church in 1095, and used this as an excuse to found a Benedictine monastery on the site. He obtained the support of the Bishop of London in 1096, and began work on the monastery to the north of the original church.The outline of the building was marked on the ground on the 29 August 1096, and construction took place between 1096 and 1115, with Eudo himself supposedly laying the first stone. The abbey and its associated buildings would have been constructed out of Roman rubble quarried from the ruins of Roman Colchester, and lime kilns, used to create lime for mortar from baking oyster shells, have been found which would have been used by the builders. As Eudo was a layman he had no authority to found an abbey, and so it was a priory in its early years. The first attempt to populate the monastery came when the Bishop of Rochester sent two monks from his diocese to the town, but they subsequently returned and were replaced by a larger contingent under the leadership of a man called Ralph. Ralph negotiated with Eudo the extent of the monastery's authority in the town, becoming its first prior, although he and his monks later left after a dispute. Eudo despaired of the project, until he met with Abbot Stephen of York, who sent thirteen monks to Colchester from York, which roughly coincided with Pope Paschal II's granting of abbey status to the institution on 10 January 1104. The leader of the monks from York, Hugh, was ordained as the first abbot of St John's Abbey by the Bishop of London. Upon Eudo’s death in 1120 on his estate at Préaux in Normandy his remains were brought to England to be interred at the abbey on 28 February 1120.
Medieval history
The abbey suffered a disaster in its early years, when a large fire in 1133, which burned much of Colchester, severely affected the monastery. Following the destruction caused by the fire major reconstruction occurred. This involved landscaping much of the area around the abbey, moving the officine and habitula from the north side of the abbey to the south side, and rebuilding the abbey itself in a cruciform layout. As the abbey building was forbidden to lay worshippers a parish church, St Giles's Church, was built to serve them sometime between 1133 and 1171. This replaced St John's Church as the parish church, which was demolished down to its foundations and covered by the spoil from the landscaping. The Church of St Giles was built to the north of the abbey on the early lay burial ground, which included many graves lined with Roman rubble.Sometime around 1170 the monastery received a vial of St Thomas Becket's blood from a monk called Ralph, who had once stayed at St John's Abbey during Becket's exile, and who had been present at Becket's murder in Canterbury. Supposedly Ralph only caught a few drops of Becket's blood in the vial, but when he sent it to Colchester it was miraculously overflowing. This vial became the abbey's most treasured relic, with supernatural healing powers attributed to it. King Henry III gave the abbey 15 oaks for upgrading the building in 1235.
The abbey was embroiled in long standing disputes with the townspeople of Colchester throughout the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, as well as several sometimes violent confrontations with the Augustinian convent of St Botolph's Priory which stood across the road from it. In 1253, following long standing dispute over access to the free warren in West Donyland, to the south of the town, and the extent of the abbot's jurisdiction, a group of forty Colchester men attacked and destroyed the abbey's gallows and tumbrels at Greenstead to the East of the town, before cutting the ropes of the abbey’s ships at Brightlingsea. By 1255 these particular disagreements were settled, although in 1270 the king had to order the abbot to desist from distraining the Colchester men in matters of trespass of bread and ale, as it was outside of his jurisdiction. An anti-abbey riot broke out at the Midsummers Fair in 1272 on St John's Green outside of the abbey, and the following day the monks showed the Colchester coroner a dead body on the Green, purportedly one of their number killed by the townspeople. The subsequent investigation, however, found that the body was of a criminal taken down from the town gallows and placed on the Green by the monks in an attempt to defame the burgesses of Colchester. In 1310 an episcopal visit by Bishop Baldock found the abbey's monks had fallen slack in observing the rules regarding the periods of silence, abstinence from consuming meat and stabilitas. The abbey found itself in trouble with the Crown in 1346, when a French prisoner, Berengar de Monte Alto, said to be the archdeacon of Paris, who had been captured at the Battle of Crécy by the English was sold in England for £50. He came into the possession of the abbot, who sold him in London, in direct defiance of the king's writ ordering his detention.
In the winter of 1348-49 the Black Death struck the town, killing up to 1,500 people including the abbot and prior of St John's Abbey by the time it began to die down in August 1349. The abbey had pleaded poverty in the 14th century in order abstain from obligations to the King. A conflict arose with the nearby St Botolph's Priory, reported by the abbot to the pope, that the canons of St Botolph's, with two hundred supporters, attacked a monk of the abbey called Thomas Stuckele, whilst laying siege to the abbey. Some of them had forced their way inside, and injured the abbot and convent. The cause of the riot is not stated, but it may have arisen through a dispute about a pension out of the church of St Peter's, in Colchester, which was settled the following year.
The abbey suffered attacks from rebels during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The rebels who had assembled in Colchester had marched south to join Wat Tyler on the 14 June, whilst those who stayed behind attacked the town's Moot Hall and St John's Abbey on 15 and 16 June, forcing the law courts to shut for five weeks, and carrying off the court rolls of the abbey. Following the attack by the disgruntled rebels on the abbey its walls and gatehouse were strengthened. Further conflict involving St John's occurred when twelve armed horsemen from the abbey were involved in a fight with townspeople outside of Colkynge's Castle in 1391 over grazing rights to the meadows in the area. The following year in 1392 the abbot and his supporters got into a fight with his own monks, which spilled over onto St John's Green outside of the abbey gate.
In 1396, a monk of the abbey, John Colschestre was appointed bishop of Orkney by Pope Boniface IX, who on 25 February 1399 also granted the abbots of Colchester the use of the mitre and permission to gives solemn blessings at the end of mass and vespers. However the abbot during this time was frequently reprimanded for mismanagement of the abbey. In 1404 the abbot, alongside other leading Colcestrians and the abbot of St Osyth's Priory, were charged with being part of an earlier conspiracy to put the deposed Richard II back on Henry IV's throne. Although the abbot was acquitted in 1405, the case led to several leading burgesses of Colchester taking legal actions against him, all of which were resolved by 1415. King Henry V later censured the abbey for building a tower in defence of the monastery on Royal land. In 1429 and 1430, during a dispute with the townsfolk over the ownership of the Hythe water mill at Colchester's port, the abbot of St John's called the town a nest of Lollards, intending it as an insult, and claimed that the town owed St John's £228 in arrears over payments for the abbey infirmary. However it was the abbot who had to pay arrears for failing alongside his predecessors of the last 130 years to find a chaplain to celebrate mass on three days in each week in St Helen's chapel in the town, something they should have done in accordance with a judgment of 1290.
The abbey, which harboured strong pro-Plantagenet feelings, became embroiled in the politics surrounding the Wars of the Roses. In the 1460s the abbey had close links with John Howard, 1st Duke of Norfolk, Constable of Colchester Castle and a supporter of the Yorkist cause. Howard interfered with the abbatial elections following the death of Abbot Ardeley in 1464, helping John Canon to win the election. Howard then appears to have interfered again in support of Abbot Stansted's election following Canon's death in 1464, both suspecting of being pro-Yorkist. During the brief restoration of the House of Lancaster in 1470–71 Howard took advantage of the abbey's charter-enshrined sanctuary status by taking refuge there. Richard III had visited Colchester several times in the 15th century, in 1467–68, staying at the pro-Yorkist St John's Abbey each time. Following the Plantagenet defeat at the Battle of Bosworth Field the abbey provided a sanctuary for Yorkists, including briefly Viscount Lovell and perhaps also Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York. The abbey's sympathies were remembered in the early Tudor period by Edward IV and Richard III's mother Cecily Neville who left a large sum to the abbey in her will.