Page 8 - Oundle Life December 2020

Last month I wrote of how we found Oundle quite by chance, and how happy we have been with that discovery. But it wasn’t until I started researching this piece that I learned of another ‘accidental arrival’ who also settled for a time to leave his mark.
The history of Oundle or ‘Undela’ as the Anglo-Saxons knew it, can be traced back to the end of the 7th century when St Wilfred founded his Monastery of St Andrew here. Sadly, Wilfred died in the early 8th century, and sometime afterwards his monastery was ‘plundered and burnt,’ by the Danes. For more than a century thereafter, Wilfred’s monastery lay waste before being accidentally rebuilt by the Bishop of Winchester in the 10th century.
Why? ‘accidentally?’ you may ask. Well,
Hugh Candidus, (or ‘Hugh the Chronicler’ as
he is known), was a monk of the Benedictine monastery at Peterborough in the 12th century who is famed for writing a medieval Latin account of its history. According to Hugh, God appeared in a vision to the Bishop of Winchester and encouraged him to travel to the ‘midland English as far as a certain ancient monastery
of St. Peter, which had been destroyed, that he might restore it to its former condition’.
With an enviable history of rebuilding, the bishop duly accepted his mission and set off
for ‘midland English’. Upon crossing the river Avondale (Nene) into Undela (Oundle), the Bishop was sure he had arrived at ‘the very place the Lord had shown to him, because he found it fit and appropriate to that place’ and he duly set
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