Page 9 - Oundle Life December 2020

about restoring the monastery of St Andrew. However, as the story goes, the Lord God
soon appeared again to the Bishop, this time suggesting that he had stopped short of his intended destination and so ‘must travel a little further along the river bed until he should come to the walls of the burnt monastery’. If we accept this account documented by Hugh the Chronicler in the 12th century, it seems that the Bishop had mistaken Undela with its monastery of St Andrew, for the other place with the monastery of St Peter. Is this perhaps why we now know our Parish Church as St. Peter’s and not St Andrew as it was first constructed?
Back on the road, the Bishop soon located his intended destination, the monastery known as Medeshamstede, and in the ensuing years
he lavishly restored and rebuilt it with funds donated generously by the King and Queen. This most magnificent monastery’s name was later changed to Peterborough Abbey, and today we know it as Peterborough Cathedral.
Back in Oundle, our beautiful St Peter’s
has continued to evolve down through the
years with five clear periods of expansion, the majority of which occurred over 250 years between the 12th and 15th centuries. It has been documented in the Victoria County History for Northamptonshire that ‘no portion’ of St Peter’s is older than 12th century even though the site was shared with the earlier chapel and some older Saxon stonework has been set into the inside west wall of the tower.
The Norman church from the 12th century
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