Oxford’s saddest ruin – between river and railway
Definitely off the tourist trail in Oxford is a cluster of narrow streets between the railway and Osney Lock on the Thames. It’s not far west of Christ Church Meadow, though you’d never think it unless you travelled by boat, since railway and water cut it off by foot.
There, off Mill Street, you will find the last ruinous remnant of Osney Abbey, a great house of Augustinian Canons founded in 1129. Its destruction is a sad loss. It was for a year or so in the 1540s the first cathedral of Oxford, till the see was transferred to the church of St Frideswide, now Christ Church.
The remains of the abbey are not much to look at – a lopsided 15th-century shallow archway – but there’s an interesting walk to view it. A little to the north (visible from East Street to the west of the river), is the 19th-century power station now being converted for use by the Saïd Business School. In Mill Street itself lies the burial ground that formed part of the abbey land. As the train from London slows down to stop at Oxford station, that can be seen on the left.
An old print of the tower of the abbey church and its roofless nave is one of the illustrations in a new book by Richard H Taylor called
A Thousand Fates, an approachable introduction to the afterlife of medieval monasteries in England and Wales. It’s a vast subject, which he wisely presents through representative examples – Wymondham Abbey as a parish church, Lacock Abbey as a country house. He is also right to emphasise the importance of antiquaries in preserving knowledge of the dissolved monasteries.
The view of Osney in the book was originally commissioned and paid for by John Aubrey, whose name in a Latin version, Johannes Albericus, was added in a cartouche. In a note included in Andrew Clark’s edition of Brief Lives, Aubrey says: “I got Mr Hesketh, Mr Dobson’s man, a priest, to draw the ruins of Osney two or three ways before ’twas pulled down. Now the very foundation is digged-up.” That must have been in 1643, when he was still only 16 and had not long begun his studies as a gentleman commoner at Trinity, interrupted by the Civil War. Hesketh was the name of a family noted for its Catholic recusancy. The drawing was engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar and published by the energetic antiquary William Dugdale in his monumental survey
Monasticon Anglicanum.
In 1672, Aubrey wrote to that lovable antiquary Anthony Wood (whom he later took to task bitterly for cutting out pages from the manuscript he’d lent him): “You must not forgett that I have 3 other faces or prospects of Osney abbey, as good as that now in the
Monasticon. They are in my trunke yet at Easton Piers [the house in Wiltshire where he was born].”
Taylor invokes Aubrey’s thoughts on the abbey in his younger days: “I can see the ruin cannot stand much
longer. There is a great arch hanging unsupported on one side, waiting to crash down on crumbling walls below.” But those are imaginings of what Aubrey would say in Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life, which Taylor mentions. She drew knowledgeably on Aubrey’s writings but that sentence has the sound of a 21st-century construction. Indeed one may think Ruth Scurr included the sentence after looking at the print.
I am not saying that a fictional autobiography is wrong, but Ruth Scurr’s book is inevitably dressed in present-day habits of thought. To know how Aubrey thought, go to his endlessly entertaining Brief Lives, free online in Clark’s edition of 1898 or for £320 in the two volumes learnedly edited in 2015 by Kate Bennett.