The house was founded by
Robert D'Oyly the younger, Norman governor of Oxford, prompted by his wife,
Edith Forne, who, to expiate the sins of her former life as the mistress of
Henry I, solicited her husband to this pious work with a story of the chattering of
magpies, interpreted by a chaplain as souls in
purgatory who needed the foundation of a monastery to expiate their sins. Edith was buried in Osney Abbey, in a
religious habit, as
John Leland describes upon seeing her tomb as it was on the eve of the dissolution: ''‘Ther lyeth an image of Edith, of stone, in th' abbite of a vowess, holding a hart in her right hand, on the north side of the high altaire’''. The legendary dream of magpies was painted near the tomb. Osney was (along with
St Osyth,
Cirencester, Llanthony, and Holy Trinity, London), one of the great Augustinian
Canon Regular houses of medieval England. It provided six of the canons of
Henry II’s re-foundation of the
Church of the Holy Cross, Waltham as an Augustinian house in 1177. When Waltham became an abbey in 1184, the first abbot was a canon of Osney. In 1199, the church of
St George in
Oxford Castle was translated and annexed to the abbey. made of the abbey, published in 1720. The most significant event in the history of the abbey came in April 1222 when the
Synod of Oxford met there, charged with applying the
Lateran decrees in England. When in July 1237, the
papal legate Cardinal
Otto Candidus came to Osney, a brawl broke out between a group of scholars from the
university and the cardinal's men in which the legate's cook was killed. Otto himself was locked for safety in the abbey tower, emerging unscathed to lay the city under
interdict in reprisal. The current navigation of the
River Thames, replacing the old navigation to the east side of
Osney Island, is believed to have been engineered by the canons of the abbey to turn their mill. After the abbey's
surrender in 1539, it was, from September 1542 until June 1544, the seat of the new
Bishops of Oxford before the see transferred to the new foundation of
Christ Church. It has been described as the greatest building Oxford has lost.
Great Tom, the bell described as the "loudest thing in Oxford", now hanging in
Tom Tower at Christ Church, was taken from the tower of Osney Abbey on its dissolution. A good deal of the monastic property was also transferred to Christ Church, and the remains of the abbey remained as a source of building material for the city and by
Charles I during the
English Civil War. Drawings of the remains were commissioned by
John Aubrey in 1640, and the much reduced ruins were drawn by
Thomas Hearne of
St Edmund Hall in 1720. == Burials ==