On Wednesday 16 December 1523 inside the cool walls of Romsey Abbey, Elizabeth Ryprose was elected Abbess. The previous holder of the position, Ann Westbroke, had died the previous month, and the abbey’s community assembled in prayer to ask for inspiration as to who should be the next Abbess. Elizabeth was agreed on, and after they asked her to assume her new role she accepted, ‘not willing furthermore to resist the will of God in that behalf’. She made three crosses with her hand, and on 16 January 1524 the Bishop confirmed her role in writing.
The abbey that Elizabeth was soon to be in charge of was large, dominating the market town in the New Forest. Romsey was founded in 907, and had been visited by William Rufus in 1093, King Henry I in 1105 and King John in 1200. As for Elizabeth, she served during one of the most turbulent times in English history, particularly in terms of religion. Henry VIII was at the head of the realm, and had been married to the Spanish Catherine of Aragon for fourteen years. The Princess Mary – who would one day rule as queen regnant - was almost eight years old. Soon after Elizabeth’s election as Abbess, Henry would meet Anne Boleyn and, concerned for the future of his dynasty, engage in a separation of the nation from the Pope in order to gain an annulment of his marriage to his queen.
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| Figure thought to depict Elizabeth Ryprose, Romsey Abbey |
For now though, Elizabeth worked at Romsey abbey, taking control of its administration and the lives of the nuns under her care. They wore veils that covered their foreheads, were expected to walk in a composed, orderly fashion and maintained silence in the church and other parts of the abbey. If one of the nuns wanted to speak with a member of their family or a friend, Elizabeth had to give permission for them to chat in her Great Chamber. A document created in 1534 gives the names of a number of the nuns at Romsey, some of whom were only fourteen years old. A list of nuns in 1538 list twenty-five nuns as well as Elizabeth. The Abbess’ job was also to collect rents for the lands owned by the abbey, which included sites in Dorset, Wiltshire and Gloucester. In the summer of 1526, Henry was due to visit Romsey Abbey where he would have met Elizabeth – however at that time the town was suffering with plague and he chose to stay in Winchester.
A painting in Romsey Abbey depicts a number of saints and religious figures but is also thought to include a representation of Elizabeth. She looks up, in prayer, from the bottom left hand side of the painting, with a scroll saying, in Latin, ‘Christ is risen from the tomb’.
Overseeing an abbey was not always an easy business, and Elizabeth had to deal with the attitudes and behaviour of some of the nuns as well as the huge religious changes that would soon jolt the country. On 16 January 1527 Lady Alice Gorsyn, one of the abbey’s nuns, admitted to using ‘bad language with her sisters, and spread abroad reproachful and defamatory words of them’. Clemence Malyn, the sub-prioress, was removed by Elizabeth for harbouring a thief in the abbey buildings and hiding a key for him to enter, but insisted that she had not done ‘wrong with him’. Another nun, Margaret Dowman, also confessed to having a secret relationship with a man named Thomas Hordes.
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| Entrance to Romsey Abbey |
By 1538, Henry VIII’s administrator John Foster wrote to Sir Thomas Seymour, reporting that the abbey’s jewels and plate were worth £300, while six bells would fetch £100. He estimated that the abbey’s lead and stone were worth £300-£400, and that the abbess and the nuns would readily accept the suppression of the abbey. Henry Liveing, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, points out that Henry VIII’s eventual suppression of the abbey may have been less peaceful than this letter makes out. As he states, Elizabeth and the other nuns do not appear to have been awarded any pension, which, he says, would have been arranged if they had surrendered peacefully. This is where Elizabeth’s story as Abbess ends, but thankfully the abbey did not meet the same fate as many others.
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| Bill of Sale of 1544, at Romsey Abbey |
By 1544, Henry VIII’s dissolution of abbeys and monasteries was well underway. At Reading Abbey, the abbot was hanged from his abbey gateway for refusing to give up the building to the king. Anne Boleyn, the woman who had triggered Henry’s sudden urge for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and England’s separation from the Pope, was beheaded on 19 May 1536. Thomas Cromwell, the king’s most prominent advisor, was also executed in 1540. Romsey was no longer a functioning abbey under the Pope’s control. But townspeople engaged now in a fight for the abbey to prevent it being dismantled.
A five-hundred-year-old document is on display in the abbey today. It marks Robert Cook, John Ham, John Salt and John Knight as ‘Guardians of the Church of Romsey’. These men purchased the abbey from the king in 1544, just three years before the king’s death. It is to them, and the successive generations that have included Romsey Abbey in their wills and donations, that we can walk through the passages and past the stone columns that Elizabeth and her nuns would have known in the earlier sixteenth century.
Notes:
Henry G. D. Living, Vicar of Hyde, Winchester. Records of Romsey Abbey 907-1558, Warren and Son, Winchester, 1906.
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