Colchester Abbey

St John’s Abbey, also called Colchester Abbey, was a Benedictine monastery founded in 1095 on the edge of the walled town near the road to Mersea Island. It stood on the site of an earlier Saxon church built from Roman rubble, which had been linked to miraculous voices. After the Norman conquest the land passed to Eudo Dapifer, steward to William I and William II, who claimed to have seen a miracle there in 1095. The first monks arrived from Rochester but soon left, and the project was revived with thirteen monks sent from York in 1104. By 1120 the abbey had its own abbot, Hugh, and Eudo himself was buried there after his death. The abbey grew into a powerful institution, owning land and ships, and acquiring a vial of St Thomas Becket’s blood said to overflow miraculously. It rebuilt after a great fire in 1133, adopting a cruciform plan and moving its offices to the south. A parish church, St Giles’s, was built to the north for lay worshippers, while the old Saxon church was buried beneath spoil from the landscaping. Relations with the town were often tense, marked by riots, attacks on abbey property and legal disputes over jurisdiction and rights. Today only the elaborate gatehouse remains above ground, but the foundations of the abbey church were rediscovered in 2010. Visitors can still walk past the site where the Saxon church once stood and see the gatehouse that once controlled entry to the monastery. The area around the abbey was reshaped in the 12th century, with new buildings and a church for the townspeople. The memory of the abbey’s conflicts and its relics, like the vial of Becket’s blood, lingers in local records. The gatehouse and the buried church foundations are the only visible traces of what was once one of Essex’s most important Benedictine houses.