If you were asked to guess the oldest town in Britain, you might not think of Abingdon. But the market town, which lies six miles south of Oxford, claims — and with some justice — to be the “oldest continuously occupied town” in this country. Situated on a loop of the Thames, in a green river valley, Abingdon was a densely-occupied and well-defended settlement by the Iron Age, surrounded by ditches which can still be traced in the plan of the modern town. Throughout the Roman and early Anglo-Saxon periods, the town’s population persisted, and by the tenth century had become the site of an important monastery.
Tourists who come to Oxford from around the world rarely make their way to Abingdon; it’s a working town, not a showplace. Its central shopping area was a casualty of post-war planners, a mass of modern concrete and chain stores; to the north, new housing estates are creeping ever closer to the famous university city. What might have been Abingdon’s chief tourist attraction, its cathedral-like abbey church, was destroyed five centuries ago.
And yet few towns are better proof of just how long and rich the history of apparently ordinary places can be. The two caveats in Abingdon’s claim to longevity (“town”, rather than city, and “in continuous occupation”) are significant, because it’s in these smaller communities — and the remarkable continuity of their institutions and collective lives — that the bedrock of British history lies.
The monks of Abingdon were making books and writing history centuries before any scholars came to settle in Oxford. One of the most influential figures in the late Anglo-Saxon church, St Æthelwold, was abbot here in the tenth century. A vigorous and industrious man — and a champion of educational and religious progress — Æthelwold didn’t spend long at Abingdon. But it still bears traces of the work he did to build up the abbey: a stream in the town, once the abbey millstream, follows the course Æthelwold and his monks set for it a thousand years ago. They may have been copying the line of the prehistoric defences, already ancient by Æthelwold’s time.
Æthelwold and his fellow abbots were running a school at Abingdon when Oxford was just a crossing-place over the Thames. But by the twelfth century, when Abingdon’s most famous son was born, the balance was already beginning to shift. Abingdon’s own saint, Edmund, was born into a middle-class family in the town around 1174. His mother wanted him to be well-educated, so she sent him not to the abbey but to school in Oxford, which by that time was gathering the communities of teachers and students who would form the nucleus of the university.
A devout and studious boy, Edmund made the most of his opportunities, and prospered both in Oxford and at university in Paris. He was known for his skill as a lecturer, his attention to his students, and his generosity to poorer scholars. He ended his career as Archbishop of Canterbury, but it’s as “Edmund of Abingdon” that he has gone down in history — and how he’s remembered here.
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