Qualla: Bordesley Abbey

Bordesley Abbey: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For roughly four centuries the people of Redditch walked over the foundations of a great church and did not know it was there. Sheep grazed the gentle mounds at the edge of town. A road crossed what had once been the nave. Then in 1969 a team from the University of Reading started a trial trench, and Bordesley Abbey - founded in 1138, demolished in 1538, lost from sight by about 1700 - came back into view. Five and a half decades of excavation later, the archaeologists are still here. Each summer's work adds another small piece to one of the longest-running monastic digs in Britain.

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Bordesley Abbey: Founded by a Man Changing Sides

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bordesley Abbey was founded in 1138 by Waleran de Beaumont, Count of Meulan, a Norman nobleman with extensive English estates. He invited Cistercian monks from Garendon Abbey in Leicestershire to come and settle the marshy valley of the River Arrow, just upstream from the modern ...

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Bordesley Abbey: Cistercian Labour in a Difficult Valley

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Cistercians were the white-robed reformers of medieval monasticism, committed to remote sites and physical labour. The valley they were given at Bordesley was, by all accounts, mostly marsh. The first task was to drain it - to dig leets and channels, to divert the Arrow into ...

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Bordesley Abbey: Twenty Granges and a Sheep Empire

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By the early 13th century Bordesley was running an agricultural network of about twenty granges - outlying farms worked by lay brothers and hired labour - spread across Worcestershire and Warwickshire as far as 35 kilometres from the abbey itself. They grew cereal. They raised va...

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Bordesley Abbey: Surrendered on a Summer Day in 1538

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 17 July 1538, Bordesley's last abbot, John Day, signed the deed of surrender that handed the abbey over to King Henry VIII's commissioners. Two months later, on 23 September, the Crown sold the land. In 1542 it passed to Lord Windsor; the Earls of Plymouth then held it for the...

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Bordesley Abbey: Found Again

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1969 the University of Reading's 'Bordesley Abbey Project' began a programme of careful excavation that has continued, year after year, ever since. They have traced the church, the cloisters, the chapter house, the lay-brothers' range. They have uncovered tiled pavements with ...

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