A hilltop burh of Alfred the Great in Dorset, and the site of the nunnery he founded in 888 for his daughter Æthelgifu: the shrine of Edward the Martyr, the richest house of nuns in England, a town with three royal mints, and the place where Cnut the Great died on 12 November 1035.
Shaftesbury occupies the end of a steep greensand ridge in north Dorset, with the ground falling away sharply on three sides to the vale below. The site has no river and little water — the town had to fetch its supply from springs at the foot of the hill for most of its history — but it is defensible in a way almost nothing else in the county is, and that is why Alfred fortified it.
Two institutions made the place: the burh, which gave it walls and a garrison, and the abbey, which gave it a saint, a pilgrimage and an income. For six hundred and fifty years the abbess of Shaftesbury was one of the great landholders of southern England.
Alfred established a fortified settlement on the hill in 880, in the years after the Battle of Edington, as part of the system of burhs built to make Wessex defensible against Danish armies that moved faster than any field force could follow. The plan was to put every man within a day’s march of a defended place, garrisoned by a rota drawn from the surrounding land.
Shaftesbury appears in the Burghal Hidage, the early tenth-century document that lists the burhs with the hides of land assigned to man their walls, among the Dorset strongholds. The scheme survived Alfred: the town was still walled and still garrisoned under his grandsons, and under Æthelstan, first King of the English, two royal mints were striking pennies there. Edward the Confessor later licensed a third.
In 888 Alfred founded a Benedictine nunnery within the burh and installed his daughter Æthelgifu as its first abbess. Asser records the foundation, and the endowment was generous from the start; royal women and the daughters of great families entered it, and its estates spread across Dorset and Wiltshire.
The house grew so rich that it became a byword. The saying ran that if the abbot of Glastonbury could marry the abbess of Shaftesbury their heir would hold more land than the king of England — a joke about two monastic estates that were, between them, among the largest concentrations of property in the country. By the eve of the dissolution Shaftesbury was the wealthiest nunnery in England.
The abbey’s fortune was made by a murdered king. Edward the Martyr was killed at Corfe in 978 in circumstances the sources leave deliberately vague, and was buried without ceremony at Wareham. In February 981 his remains were translated to Shaftesbury and received with great solemnity; the date usually given is 20 February.
Miracles were reported at the tomb almost at once, and the cult was promoted by the very government of his half-brother Æthelred the Unready, perhaps in expiation. Shaftesbury became a pilgrimage town, and for a time the abbey and even the town were called by the saint’s name. Bones claimed as Edward’s were recovered in excavations on the site in 1931, and their identification has been argued over ever since.
Cnut the Great died at Shaftesbury on 12 November 1035 and was carried to Winchester for burial in the Old Minster. He had ruled England for nearly twenty years and Denmark alongside it, and he had been a patron of exactly this kind of house; dying at a royal nunnery on a Dorset hill was the ordinary end of an itinerant king rather than anything remarkable in itself.
What followed was not ordinary. His son Harthacnut was in Denmark fighting to hold it, and a council at Oxford divided England, leaving Emma of Normandy to keep Wessex for Harthacnut from Winchester while Harold Harefoot held the north. Within two years Harold was king everywhere and Emma had been driven out to Bruges. The North Sea empire Cnut had assembled did not survive the journey from Shaftesbury to the grave.
The town outside the abbey gates lived off the pilgrims, the abbey’s household and the trade of the vale. A market charter came in 1260, and by 1340 the borough had a recognised mayor; at its medieval height Shaftesbury had a dozen churches and chapels, of which very little now stands.
The last abbess, Elizabeth Zouche, surrendered the house in 1539, and the church was pulled down for its stone within a few years. What survives is a walled excavation of the foundations, laid out as a garden, with the site of the high altar and the shrine marked; the town above it kept its market and lost everything else that had made it.