Godstow Abbey

A Ruined Nunnery

The ruins of this twelfth-century Benedictine nunnery stand in a meadow beside the River Thames near Godstow Lock, just north-west of Oxford. The Abbey’s foundress was Edith of Winchester, the wealthy widow of Sir William Launceline, and the abbey also enjoyed royal support from first Henry I and then Henry II, whose mistress ‘Fair Rosamund’ was buried there around 1176. In 1539 Godstow was one of the last abbeys to be dissolved under Henry VIII. Because its abbess, Lady Katherine Bulkeley, had close connections with the king’s secretary, Thomas Cromwell, she was able for a couple of years to hold off the pressure to surrender the abbey’s building and lands. At its dissolution, the sixteen nuns who lived in Godstow were thrown out into the world with small pensions.