GLOUCESTER began as a Roman town. It lies at the first point where the river Severn can be easily crossed so it was a natural place to build a town. About 49 AD the Romans built a fort to guard the river crossing at Kingsholm. In 64 AD they built a new fort on the site of GLOUCESTER town centre. About 75 AD the Roman army moved on but the site of the fort was turned into a town for retired soldiers. The new town was called Glevum. The Roman town was laid out in a grid pattern. In the centre of the town was a forum. This was a market place lined with shops and public buildings. However in the 4th century Roman civilisation went into decline. The last Roman soldiers left Britain in 407 AD. Afterwards most Roman towns were abandoned.
In Anglo-Saxon GLOUCESTER there was no continuous urban life to link the 4th century with the 10th, the physical framework of the Roman colony necessarily affected later development. The earliest Roman occupation, the fort built in the 60s A.D. north of GLOUCESTER at Kingsholm, was abandoned after a decade. The Roman fortress, the precursor of the medieval town, was built in the 70s A.D. in a position commanding the crossing of the river Severn. The river then flowed closer to the town than it does today, in or near the channel later known as the Old Severn and crossed by the Foreign bridge. After the fortress became a colony in the 2nd century, stone walls and gates were provided, as well as a stone quay and quayside retaining wall. The Roman north and east gates survived until the 11th century and the quayside wall until the 12th, while the east, south, and part of the north lengths of the Roman circuit still defended the city in the 17th century. The original west wall of the Roman fortress had gone by the 10th century. The riverside retaining wall was, by the 4th century, the western limit of GLOUCESTER's defences. Containing centres of religious significance, post-Roman GLOUCESTER probably kept its reputation and function as an administrative centre. In 577, when it was captured by the Anglo-Saxon invaders after the Battle of Dyrham, it was regarded as the head of a district.
By the mid 7th century GLOUCESTER had come within the influence of the kingdom of the Hwicce, which passed into the control of Mercia, possibly in 628, with the aid of Northumbrian warlords. In contrast to 8th-century mercantile centres such as Southampton, GLOUCESTER received few imports from far afield. GLOUCESTER was still, however, regarded as an administrative centre in 577 and was founded in 681 among chief Benedictine monasteries. In the 11th century Croatian Benedictines had more than 40 monasteries, mostly along the Adriatic coast.
At GLOUCESTER it is significant that a Roman cemetery became the site of the late Anglo-Saxon minster of St. Oswald, and that the church of St. Mary de Lode, which became the parish church for the estates of St. Peter's Abbey around GLOUCESTER, had its origins in a small post-Roman burial chapel or mausoleum, which was aligned, perhaps deliberately, on the Roman house beneath. In or about 681, with the consent of Æthelred, king of Mercia, Osric, under-king of the Hwiccas, founded a monastery at GLOUCESTER in honour of St. Peter and St. Paul.
Bernulph, king of the Mercians (ob. 823), is said to have rebuilt the church, and to have endowed a body of secular priests with the former possessions of the nuns, and in addition five hides in Standish. After the Alfredian tradition, in GLOUCESTER, a burh was fortified by Ethelfleda's father Alfred in the ninth century after what street patterns and grids remained, from the extent of the Anglo-Saxon burh is indicated by those tenements which later paid landgavel.
In 877 the remnants of a Danish army camped in the town. At least two lanes in the lower Westgate Street area adjoining the Old Severn, Myende Lane and Powke Lane, had Old English names. In the 10th century GLOUCESTER acquired an administrative and military status which it is tempting to equate with the revival of towns elsewhere in southern England. Included in the western part of the Anglo-Saxon burh were houses which were recorded as being destroyed soon after the Conquest to make way for the first Norman castle and probably also a group of dwellings around St. Mary de Lode church on land belonging to the old minster. The old minster of St. Peter, the mother church of GLOUCESTER, was founded by Osric, under-king of the Hwicce, c. 679 and probably had a continuous existence in some form until it underwent a Benedictine reform c. 1022. St. Oswald's minster was founded c. 900 by Ethelfleda, Lady of the Mercians, and in 909 it received the relics of King Oswald of Northumbria. In 909 AD the remains of St Oswald were brought to GLOUCESTER. In 1153 the church which housed St Oswald's shrine was turned into a priory (a small abbey).
GLOUCESTER was untouched by the monastic revival in the reign of King Edgar. In 1022 Wulfstan II, who held the sees of both Worcester and York, changed the community of secular priests into a convent of Benedictine monks and put them under the rule of Abbot Edric who can be said to have been one by the GLOUCESTER tradtion. Lands at Badgeworth and Hatherley were sold from the sees that changed the community. In 1058 Edric was succeeded by Wilstan, a monk of Worcester and pilgrim to Jerusalem. Aldred, then bishop of Worcester, rebuilt the church from the foundations; to recoup the expense he took possession of the lands of the monks at Leach, Oddington, Standish, and Barton, and annexed them to the see of York, to which he succeeded in 1061. Serlo, a Norman monk of Mont St. Michel, was appointed by William the Conqueror.
In the Domesday Survey the possessions of the convent in Gloucestershire also included the manors of Boxwell, Buckland, Aldsworth, Hinton, Highnam, and Preston, of the old endowment, Ledene of the gift of Walter de Lacy, Duntisbourne, of the gift of his wife; in Hampshire, Linkenholt, the gift of Ernulf de Hesding in 1082; in Worcestershire half a hide in Wick; in Herefordshire the manors of Westwood, Brompton, and Lea, making in all 89˝ hides. In 1093 Abbot Serlo regained the manor of Nympsfield. In 1095, with the aid of the king, he compelled Thomas, archbishop of York, to restore all the lands at Leach, Oddington, Standish, and Barton, which had remained in the possession of the see of York since 1058.
The 10th-century town produced its own pottery, objects of silver, and glass. In the 10th century no significant events are recorded after the death of Athelstan at GLOUCESTER in 939.
Edmund Ironside was at GLOUCESTER in 1016 and Harthacnut came to the town at least once. Under Edward the Confessor GLOUCESTER was the meeting place of the council nine times between 1043 and 1062. Those gatherings, some of considerable size, are likely to have been held in the hall at Kingsholm. In 1051 Edward the Confessor assembled forces at GLOUCESTER against Godwin's revolt; in 1055 levies of troops gathered there to meet Earl Alfgar's revolt; and in 1063 GLOUCESTER was the starting point of Harold's expedition against the Welsh.
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