[10] The Bishop of Lincoln confirms that it was Edith's money and will that created the community although she had enjoyed support from Henry I of England.

[9] The abbey was again enlarged between 1176 and 1188 when Henry II gave the establishment £258 (which included £100 for the church), 40,000 shingles, 4,000 laths, and a large quantity of timber.

Surviving letters from Katherine to Cromwell show her to have been a supporter of the reform of religious houses, while also sending him suitable gifts and delicacies.

But in late October 1538, the abbey at Godstow was visited by Cromwell's suppression commissioner, Dr John London who demanded access to the (enclosed) nuns to question them; and pressure them into leaving the religious life.

Dr London's rejoinder was that it was Lady Katherine who had assaulted him and his party in the proper execution of their commission; she being supported by Thomas Powell, rector of Godstow and "naturally a rough fellow".

In response, Lady Katherine assured Cromwell that "there is neither pope nor purgatory, image nor pilgrimage nor praying to dead saints used or regarded amongst us."

The abbey was suppressed in November 1539 under the Second Act of Dissolution; although Cromwell was able to ensure that Lady Katherine received a generous pension of fifty pounds a year.

George Price Boyce, the Victorian watercolour painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelite art movement, visited and painted the nunnery in 1862.

The abbey was the final burial place of the famed beauty Rosamund Clifford (died c. 1176), a long-term mistress of Henry II.

Henry and the Clifford family paid for her tomb in the choir of the convent's church at Godstow, and gave an endowment for it to be tended by the nuns.

Her tomb was moved outside the abbey church to the cemetery at the nuns' chapter house next to it, where it could still be visited; but it was destroyed in the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII.

Paul Hentzner, a German traveller who visited England c.1599, records[18] that her faded tombstone inscription read in part:... Adorent, Utque tibi detur requies Rosamunda precamur.

")Followed by a punning epitaph: Hic jacet in tumba Rosamundi non RosamundaNon redolet sed olet, quae redolere solet.