Spinney Abbey

Spinney Abbey, originally known as Spinney Priory, is a house and farm on the site of a former monastic foundation close to the village of Wicken, on the edge of the fens in Cambridgeshire, England.

Between 1216 and 1228, Beatrice, the granddaughter of Wimar, Steward of the Count of Brittany, founded the Priory of St Mary and the Holy Cross in the spinney a mile (1.6 km) from Wicken. The priory accommodated three canons of the Augustinian order. It was endowed with the advowson of the parish church, 55 acres (223,000 m²) of land, a marsh called Frithfen and the fishery of Gormere. Frithfen is likely to have included at least part of the area now known as Wicken Fen National Nature Reserve, although its exact location is unclear. As such this is the earliest record concerning that area, as well as Spinney Priory. For centuries the monastery was associated with the fen, and this continues even now with water being pumped from the farm fields into the Nature Reserve.

In 1301 Mary de Bassingbourne expanded the establishment with 90 acres (364,000 m²) more and four more canons. The bad news was that her endowment depended upon the canons feeding three thousand poor people per year – a task which they soon enough complained was 'grievous and insupportable'.

In 1403 the Prior, William de Lode, was murdered by three of his own canons who stabbed him in the priory church. What happened to the murderers is unrecorded. This grisly tale has given rise to many ghost stories about the Abbey.

Fortunes at Spinney declined with the Black Death and the social upheavals of the fourteenth century, and in 1449 Spinney Priory was absorbed into the cathedral priory of Ely, which in due course became Ely Cathedral, once the monastery had been suppressed. From the time of its union with Ely, Spinney Priory ceased to be an Augustinian monastery, and became Benedictine.

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