This year marks the 900th anniversary of the foundation of one of the greatest of England’s medieval abbeys, now lying in ruins

Jerome K. Jerome and his two fellow Argonauts did not care for Reading. “The river here is dismal and dirty,” he wrote in Three Men in a Boat, first published in 1889; “one does not linger in the neighbourhood of Reading.” But Jerome was not insensitive to its historical significance: “The town itself is a famous old place.” Among the attractions, he noted, was the abbey founded by King Henry I, where the king himself “lies buried” and the ruins of which “may still be seen” – as indeed they still can, within what has now been designated as the Reading Abbey Quarter.

King Henry I and his young queen, Adeliza of Louvain, established the first community of monks in Reading on 18 June 1121. One well informed contemporary believed the king founded the abbey “as a penance”. The previous year, Henry’s only legitimate son, William Ætheling, had drowned when his ship had capsized shortly after sailing from Barfleur; his body was never recovered. Close to 300 others had drowned with him. For a society nurtured on the salvation of righteous Noah and the destruction of tyrannical Pharaoh, there could be no clearer verdict on the failings of the king.