A ROYAL ABBOT to Gunton, a little before the Conquest. A monk of the period wrote the following lines about it:—
"Nullo verme perit, nulla putredine tabet
Dextra viri, nullo constringi frigore, nullo
Dissolvi fervore potest, sed semper eodem
Immutata statu persistit, mortua vivit."
In which the monk, as usual, made a "false quantity." In 870 Hingvar and Hubba, the Danes, in spite of its fancied security, utterly destroyed the abbey and put some 300 monks to death. They also destroyed Peterborough, Croyland, Ely, Huntingdon, Winchester, and other fine and wealthy monastic houses in the same barbarous manner. Bardney after this lay desolate for 200 years; after which, Gilbert De Gaunt, on whom the Conqueror had bestowed much land in mid-Lincolnshire, with the aid of the famous Bishop Remigius of Lincoln, restored it, and endowed it with revenues from at least a dozen different villages, amongst them Willingham, Southrey, Partney, Steeping, Firsby, Skendleby, Willoughby, Lusby, Winceby, Hagworthingham, Folkingham, and Heckington. This would be about 1080. In 1406 we read of Henry IV., our Lincolnshire king, spending a Saturday-to-Monday there, riding from Horncastle with his two sons and three captive earls of the Scots, Douglas, Fyfe, and Orkney, and a goodly company. The Bishop of Lincoln "with 24 horses" and the "venerable Lord Willoughby" came to do homage in the afternoon. The abbey stood on slightly rising ground, with a moat and deep ditch lined with brick, as at Tattershall, and enclosing twenty-four acres. It was half a mile from the present church. On the east side of the abbey is a large barrow on which was once a handsome cross in memory of King Æthelred, who is supposed to have been buried there, and it is quite possible that he was. The name of a field close by "Coney garth" is no doubt a corruption of Koenig Garth, which is much the same as the "King's Mead fields" near Bath Abbey, immortalised in Sheridan's "Rivals," as the place of meeting between Captain Absolute and Bob Acres, and where Sir Lucius O'Trigger inhumanly asks Acres "In case of accident . . . would you choose to be pickled and sent home? or would it be the same to you to lie here in the Abbey? I'm told there is very snug lying in the Abbey."
The site of the abbey when excavations were begun in 1909
