A pleasant ritual is sharing Christmas presents with old friends who live Gerrards Cross. The ritual takes place shortly after Christmas somewhere between Monmouth and Buckinghamshire. The venue is always carefully chosen: a meal, good beer and more presents. What could be nicer? This year the meeting took place near Godstow and all was as it should be part from the weather, blue skies and bitterly, bitterly cold. A highlight for me was stumbling across Godstow Abbey, the burial place of ‘Fair Rosamund,’ and at once old stories and legends came rushing back.
She was born Rosamund de Clifford at Clifford castle— now a ruin in Herefordshire just up the road from us. It is likely she met the young Henry II who used Clifford castle as his base in a military campaign against the Welsh. The affair began in 1166 and became generally known in 1174 —possibly on Henry’s instigation. His wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine was in open rebellion against him taking the side of her sons against their father. Anger or spite or because he sought a divorce, Henry began flaunting Rosamund, gifting her a fine house in Woodstock.There are many romantic tales of the Woodstock tower guarded by an impenetrable maze, all later, romantic inventions but in all stories, the ending is the same.
In 1176 Rosamund sickened and died a year later in Godstow Abbey—some say poisoned by Eleanor, the queen. Henry may have believed this. He may also have wished to blacken his wife’s reputation.
The ground was sodden, the wind raw and worst of all Rosamund's grave is lost. In theory, it shouldn't be difficult to find. The space is no bigger than the Leicester car park where Richard III is buried.
Henry paid for a fine tomb near the altar and an endowment for the nuns to tend it and pray for her soul. It quickly became a place of pilgrimage, people seeking miracles and decorating her grave with candles and flowers—that is until 1192 when that fun-loving prelate Hugh, the bishop of Lincoln visited the Abbey. On seeing her tomb so close to the high altar he had a small fit, called her a whore and demanded its immediate removal. The nuns had no choice. Her tomb was moved to the cemetery near their chapter house, where it remained a place of pilgrimage for local people. There it remained until the C16th when it and the Abbey were destroyed during the Reformation. Its dissolution is a blog in itself and reveals Thomas Cromwell in a new light. To my knowledge, Hilary Mantel makes no mention of it in her vast and wonderful trilogy, and I haven’t the time or inclination to check a possible fading memory.
The C17th Trout Inn, favoured by Lewis and Inspector Morse and where you could read a wonderful fictionalised account of Henry and Rosamund
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