Travelling westwards through the Royal County of Berkshire brings us to another addition to Canon Stevenson’s itinerary, the statue of Our Lady in Reading Abbey.
A digital reconstruction of Reading Abbey
Image: Reading Museum
The abbey of Our Lady and St John the Evangelist was founded for Cluniac monks by King Henry I in 1121 both to pray for him in life and to be his sepulchre in death. It came to house his great collection of relics, as well as its most famous one, the Holy Hand of St James the Great. That was given from the Imperial chapel of her late husband the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V by his daughter the Empress Matilda - and still survives to this day as I have written about in previous posts. The monastery, close as it was to Windsor and the Thames, continued to provide a burial place for some members of the royal house down to the early fifteenth century and to be the setting for royal weddings, councils and Parliaments.
Within the abbey church was a statue of Our Lady which the Bohemian diplomatic embassy saw on their visit in the way from Windsor to Salisbury in 1466. Much impressed as they were by English churches and pilgrimage shrines such as those of St Thomas at Canterbury and St Edward at Westminster the Reading statue was for them a highlight. One of their attendant rapporteurs wrote that it was “so admirable that, in my opinion, neither have I seen nor shall I ever see such an one, even should I progress to the extreme ends of the earth. For there could be no image more lovely or more beautiful.” Alas the statue, like the last Abbot and the abbey church itself did not survive the events of the 1530s. What little does survive - stark stretches of rubble core walling stripped of its ashlar facing and reduced to primeval forms - is profoundly sad yet tantalising in what it invites the visitor to recreate in the mind.
Reading Abbey from the south east
Image: Reading Museum
Our Lady of Reading pray for The King and The Queen and for us all.
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