Get Thee to a Nunnery

The Sunday Pilgrimage #9

Godstow Nunnery, Oxford, England

All the best religious stories start with a vision, and so it is with the story of Godstow Nunnery, the ruins of which still inhabit the floodplain at the top of Port Meadow in Oxford.

This vision was gifted to a certain Dame Ediva in the early 12th century. Ediva, a widow from Winchester, was told to move to Oxford, where God would in His own good time, explain to her where she was to ‘build a place to His service.’ Wisely, she did so, and soon enough, one night, she heard a voice.

The voice told her to rise from her bed and go to where a light from heaven shone on the ground, and here to establish a nunnery for 24 'of the moost gentylwomen that ye can find.' Ediva wandered out of the city until she reached Godstow, on the banks of the Thames. Sure enough, there was the light she had been promised. Being well-connected, Ediva rushed off to see the King, Henry I, and told him ‘what God in a vision her had sent.’ The King granted her the land and money she needed, and one Easter, probably in 1133, Ediva founded a nunnery dedicated to the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist.¹

Nine hundred years later, we can still see the evidence:

The ruins of Godstow Nunnery are a bit of a landmark on the beautiful floodplain of Port Meadow. Once a thriving religious house, it was dissolved by Henry VIII and transformed into a private dwelling for one of his friends, whose family lived there until the English Civil War of the 1640s, when it was damaged and fell into disrepair. Later, the site was used as a stone quarry, and later still it was bought by Oxford University, which protects what remains.

That was the situation I found it in when I went up to that university in 1991. I had a few experiences of Godstow, which mainly involved going there at night with friends, lighting fires and sitting around them smoking and drinking things. Judging by the remains of fires that I found when I visited again last December, not much has changed on that front.

Godstow, in fact, has been a site for picnics and frivolity for a long time: its most famous historical picnicker was Lewis Carroll, who used to take the young Alice and her sisters on outings there. Godstow and Port Meadow was one of the landscapes that ended up inspiring Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

This kind of behaviour, needless to say, was not the kind of thing that Dame Ediva had in mind when she founded the place. Godstow became a wealthy place for a while, especially as it had the support of the King, and it would have been a beautiful one too. In the Ashmolean Museum are some of the floor tiles from the church, featuring stags and birds:

Today, very little of the Nunnery is left: just some of the walls and the remains of a small chapel. But even a ruined Gothic window frame prompts the modern day pilgrim to imagine the place at its height:

But none of this is what makes Godstow famous. No, the best-known and most notorious tale associated with Godstow is about as irreligious as could be: a story of royal adultery. It comes from the late twelfth century, and features King Henry II and a woman named Rosamund Clifford - or as history would come to know her, ‘Rosamund the Fair.’

Rosamund was the high-born daughter of a Norman Lord from the Welsh marches. Not very much is actually known about her, which is why it is so easy to fill the gaps with stories. What we do know is that she became the mistress (or one of the mistresses: medieval kings were not especially faithful creatures) of Henry II. When their affair became public, in 1174, the Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, unsurprisingly soured on the King, and it is said that she swore revenge on both Rosamund and her husband. Soon enough, she had joined with the King’s sons in a public rebellion against him. It failed, and she was imprisoned for fifteen years.

All of which, of course, was great news for Rosamund - and, indeed, the King, who could now dedicate himself fully to his mistress. Henry had built her a palace at Woodstock, complete with a labyrinth, a well to bathe in (which can still be seen today) and a secret bower where she and the King would meet when the Queen’s back was turned. Now, there was no need to hide. The King and his lover could be out and proud.

Chroniclers of the time tended to paint Rosamund as a whore and a temptress, who had seduced the King away from the straight and narrow path - a standard treatment of women at the time. In fact, though, we know nothing much about her, or about her real relationship with the King. All we have today are a burgeoning mass of Romantic stories. Rosamund and Henry became, for a long while, an archetypal love story from the Age of Chivalry.

As that story has come down through the ages, Rosamund has been painted - quite literally - in various colours. Here, for example, is how she was imagined by the 19th century pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

Rossetti’s painting was modelled on Fanny Cornforth, a prostitute who was his own mistress at the time. Perhaps the Victorian Romantic identified with the medieval King.

You get a different feel from an Edwardian portrait painted fifty years later by John William Waterhouse. Here, Rosamund seems less breathy and seductive, and more pious and faithful. In both pictures, she is gazing from a window waiting for the King to return. In Waterhouse’s painting, though, there is also something more sinister going on. Who is that woman peeking through the curtain while Rosamund’s back is turned …?

Yes, it’s Queen Eleanor, back for her promised revenge. She is about to corner Rosamund and force her to choose the manner of her own death: by dagger or by poison. Rosamund, it is said, chose the poison, and died at the feet of the Queen. Those pre-Raphaelite painters had a field day with that part of the story too. Here is Edward Burne-Jones:

Unfortunately - or fortunately, if you happen to actually be Rosamund - this dark fairytale version of her death is not actually true. Eleanor was still in prison when Rosamund died, young, of an unidentified ailment. It may be that before she died she had already broken off her affair with Henry and retired to Godstow to become a nun, as a form of penance. What we do know is that she was buried there, and that her grave became, for a while, a place of pilgrimage.

Henry had his lover buried in front of the main altar, but when the Bishop of Lincoln visited Godstow in 1190 he was horrified to see the King’s erstwhile mistress in the holiest place in the church, and ordered her tomb removed to another part of the Nunnery, where a new inscription was carved upon it:

This tomb doth here enclose the world’s most beauteous Rose,
Rose passing sweet erewhile, now nought but odour vile.

If that doesn’t remind you of the briefness of this Earthly life, I suppose nothing will.

Rosamund’s grave, they say, is still to be found somewhere in the Nunnery ruins, though the location has long been lost. Naturally they also say that her ghost still wanders the grounds to this day, as ghosts will do - gliding through Port Meadow in the moonlight, lamenting her tragic fate.

1. Taken from a good history of the nunnery which can be found at British History Online.