BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

ABBESS MATILDA

Gemma sui generis . . . tota virillis etat. [A jewel of her race . . . she had all the qualities of a man.]. From the eulogy on Matilda de Bailleul, Abbess of Wherwell, circa 1214.

Wherwell Priory must be one of England’s most desirable residences, a long, elegant house, whitewashed, that comes with fishing rights on the Test, Hampshire’s famous trout stream. The priory is currently inhabited by the Hon. James Hogg, who may or may not succeed to the hereditary earldom of Hailsham, a title conferred on the heirs male of the Hoggs by Queen Victoria in her Jubilee year. It has long been suspected that the priory was built with stones taken from Wherwell Abbey, a Benedictine nunnery that bit the dust after Henry VIII divorced the Church of England from Rome. But when the Dissolution of 1540 hit Wherwell (and made its stonework available for the ‘Priory’) the abbey was already in decline, a victim of scandals (some of them unprintable) and mismanagement. For the Abbey, that sad state was nothing new. Founded in Saxon times, the Abbey had been in 1144 burnt to the ground by Queen Matilda during her effort to (re)claim the English throne from King Stephen. Shortly thereafter Wherwell Abbey was taken over by another imperious Matilda, Matilda de Bailleul, who by the time of her death (December 14, 1214) had reestablished the Abbey, secured its rents, and attracted a thriving spiritual community of 40+ nuns. This Matilda may not have had “all the qualities of a man”, but she came from a family network of knights and barons who, in Flanders, had proved relatively unconcerned about gender. Some of Matilda’s kin who were women became captains (castellans) of various Flanders castles. So when her own short and childless marriage ended, she already knew how to become Abbess of Wherwell and then to put the Abbey in order. The exact details of how she managed this miracle cannot today be known. But a later inventory of the Abbey’s sacred relics suggests that as Abbess Matilda made good use of the new cult of Thomas Becket, that ‘troublesome priest’ who was sainted in 1173 for his (fatal) defiance of King Henry II. She may also have used some of her own wealth to restore the Abbey’s buildings, its vineyards, and it rents. In order to make her reforms stick, Abbess Matilda made new alliances with powerful aristocrats, not all of them local, which helped the Abbey to acquire new rents as well as secure old ones. Probably her best gift to the Abbey was to bring in her successor, her niece Euphemia, who succeeded her as Abbess. Euphemia also wrote the eulogy quoted above, and in her own long tenure (1214-1257) continued to augment the abbey’s prosperity and add to its physical plant. Modern archaeology has, since the 1990s, told us much more about how Matilda and Euphemia rebuilt the Abbey and its outbuildings. As for Wherwell Priory’s current occupants, the Hoggs, that’s another story. ©.