Wherwell Abbey

She retired there to live a life of penance for her part in the murders of her first husband Æthelwald and of her step-son King Edward.

[1][2] It would seem that immediately after the foundress's death, King Æthelred confirmed by charter all his mother's gifts to the abbey, where the abbess was then Heanfied.

[4] The Domesday Book records the abbey's property as comprising the vills of Wherwell, Tufton Goodworth, Little Anne, Middleton, Bullington, and houses in Winchester, all in Hampshire.

[8] By then the abbess had had a psalter in her possession which is believed to have been made by two scribes and an artist associated with St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire.

Euphemia built a new farmery, dorter and areas for other functions, such as latrines with running water, all away from the main buildings, and nearby a chapel of the Blessed Virgin, with a large enclosed garden.

When the decaying bell tower collapsed on to the dorter in the early hours, narrowly missing the nuns, she built a tall and handsome replacement that matched the remaining buildings and in her old age she had dismantled and rebuilt with 12-foot deep foundations the sanctuary of the church.

[1] Abbess Euphemia also oversaw a significant expansion in the size of the community with the number of nuns being housed reaching 80.

[1] In larger monastic houses of both men and women, the sacristan held a highly responsible post and at Wherwell was the beneficiary of specific income from dedicated rents.

It detailed two precious chalices donated by Abbess Maud herself and Abbess Ellen de Percy and nine other chalices, several for use on a specific altar, two with depictions of St Thomas Becket on the foot, a number of silver and silver gilt ciboria and pyxes to hold the sacred hosts, one in the form of a tower.

This indicates not idle riches, but a certain level of income plus an attention to the dignity of the liturgical services as already seen a century earlier under Abbess Euphemia.

After having been in substance harassed for some years, the abbey was left with no option but to surrender at the Dissolution of the monasteries to the crown on 21 November 1539.

The abbey has disappeared, but in 1997 a geophysical survey by archaeologists from Southampton University located the foundations under the lawn of the eighteenth-century Wherwell Priory.