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Roche Abbey: the sources
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There are few surviving documentary sources for
Roche Abbey, for many of the abbey’s muniments, stored in a chest
in St Mary’s Tower, York, were lost or destroyed during the Civil
War siege of York in June 1644, when the Parlamentarians blasted
the tower.(1) Fortunately, several seventeenth-century
antiquaries had already transcribed some of the documents from the
various religious houses; others survived the blast and are preserved
in later copies.
Roger Dodsworth’s transcriptions of a selection
of Roche’s charters in the seventeenth century are now kept in the
Bodleian Library, Oxford,(2) and printed
in Dugdale’s Monasticon.(3) Another
set of transcripts was copied in the nineteenth century at Hooten
Levett Hall, Rotherham, ‘made, doubtless, for some legal purpose’ .(4)
These fourteen charters were edited and published by Addy in 1878
as Roche Abbey Charters, and supplemented with two original
charters rescued by Dr Sykes, a localman of Rotherham; one, he retrieved
from a drawer in a stationer’s office, the other from a sackful
of old documents about to be shredded by a gardener and used to
fasten branches to the wall.(5)
As well as documentary sources, there are
various surviving artefacts, some of which were recovered during excavation
of the site. These include lead fragments, wax seals, and pieces of
coloured glass. Whilst little remains of the buildings, aerial photography
of the precinct is highly revealing and shows an extremely clear outline
of the site.
In addition to these two sets of transcripts, miscellaneous
documents relating to Roche are scattered throughout royal and county
record collections. The dissolution of the house is well documented
in the reports of Henry VIII’s commissioners, Doctors Layton and
Leigh, and a remarkable description of the spoliation at Roche survives
in an eighteenth-century copy.(6)
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