Reading was not the only Cluniac establishment upon the Thames.  Another, and earlier one, was to be found at Bermondsey; but its proximity to London and its distance down river forbid it having any place in these pages.  It was founded immediately after the Conquest; Lanfranc colonised it with French monks; it became an abbacy at the very end of the fourteenth century, and was remarkable for its continual accretion of wealth, an accretion in some part due to the growing importance of London throughout its existence.  At the end of the thirteenth century it stands worth L280.  At the time of its dissolution, on the first of January 1538, in spite of the much higher value of money in the sixteenth century as compared with the thirteenth, it stands worth over L500:  L10,000 a year.

A relic of its building remained (but only a gatehouse) till 1805.

Osney also dated from the early twelfth century, and was almost contemporary with Reading.

It stood just outside the walls of Oxford Castle to the west, and upon the bank of the main stream of the Thames, and owed its foundation to the Conqueror’s local governing family of Oilei.  Though at the moment of its suppression it hardly counted a fifth of the revenues of Westminster (which must be our standard throughout all this examination), yet its magnificence profoundly affected contemporaries, and has left a great tradition.  It must always be remembered that these great monasteries were not only receivers of revenue as are our modern rich, but were also producers or, rather, could be producers when they chose, and that therefore the actual economic power of any one foundation might always be higher, and often was very considerably higher, than the nominal revenue, the dead income, which passed to the spoliators of the sixteenth century.  When a town is sacked the army gets a considerable loot, but nothing like what the value was of the city as it flourished before the siege.

At any rate, whether Osney owed its magnificence to internal industry, to a wise expenditure, or to a severity of life which left a large surplus for ornament and extension, it was for 400 years the principal building upon the upper river, catching the eye from miles away up by Eynsham meadows and forming a noble gate to the University town for those who approached it from the west by the packway, of which traces still remain, and over the bridges which the Conqueror had built.  So deep was the impress of Osney upon the locality, and even upon the national Government, that Henry proposed, as in the case of Westminster, to make of the building one of his new cathedrals, and to establish there his new See of Oxford.  The determination, however, lasted but for a very short time.  In a few years the financial pressure was too much for him; he transferred the see to the old Church of St Frideswides, where it still remains, and gave up Osney to loot.  It was looted very thoroughly.