Bermondsey Abbey
Though surviving only in a copy written at Peterborough in the 12th century, a letter of Pope Constantine (708–715) grants privileges to a monastery at Vermundesei.
[2] Nothing more is heard of any church at Bermondsey until 1082, when, according to the "Annales Monasterii de Bermundeseia", a monastery was founded there by one Alwinus Child, with royal licence.
[4] Alwinus Child's new monastery, dedicated to St Saviour, is presumably identical with the 'new and handsome church' which appears in the Domesday Book record for Bermondsey, in 1086.
In effect, Domesday Book clarifies the "Annales"' mention of royal licence, since it records that the estate of Bermondsey was then held by King William the Conqueror, a small part being also in the hands of Robert, Count of Mortain, the king's half brother, and younger brother of Odo of Bayeux, then earl of Kent.
Alwinus Child's only recorded gift to the new monastery was 'various rents in the city of London', and these may be represented in Domesday Book by mention of 13 burgesses there paying 44 d annually to the estate at Bermondsey.
The new monastery was established as an alien Cluniac priory through the arrival in 1089 of four monks from St Mary's of La Charité-sur-Loire, apparently at the invitation of Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury.
The monks began the development of the marshes surrounding the abbey, cultivating the land and embanking the riverside into a Priory Close spanning 140 acres of meadow and digging dykes.
In 1380, Richard Dunton, the first English prior, paid a fine of 200 marks (£133 6s 8d) to have the Bermondsey monastery's establishment naturalised: this protected it from actions taken against alien properties in time of war, but it also set the priory on the path to independent status as an abbey, divorced from both La Charité and Cluny, which it achieved in 1390.
At Christmas 1154, the newly crowned King Henry II and his Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, held court at Bermondsey Priory.
The house was later in the hands of Thomas Radclyffe, 3rd Earl of Sussex (c. 1525–1583), a diplomat and leading courtier of Queen Elizabeth I, and he was using it as a residence by 1570, when she visited him there.
By 1822, The Morning Post reported that all that remained was "a solitary fragment or two of stone wall, in what is called King John's Court, together with a few old buildings".
The remains of the south-western tower of the abbey church can be seen below the glass floor of the Del'Aziz restaurant and bar on Bermondsey Square.
[14] In 1932, the consecration stone of the Abbey was discovered by a workman at a petrol station in Tower Bridge Road, where it had been placed in the foundations of a later building.
