St Oswald's Priory

Saxon priory ruins founded around 900 AD by Aethelflaed, daughter of Alfred the Great

St Oswald's Priory sits in a small public park just north of the city centre and is one of the oldest surviving religious sites in Gloucester — what remains of a priory founded around 900 AD by Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercia and daughter of Alfred the Great. The ruins are fragmentary but atmospheric: the base of the Saxon nave wall, some later Norman and medieval additions, and a setting that makes the age of the place tangible.

The bones of the Northumbrian king and martyr St Oswald were brought here from Bardney Abbey, which gave the priory its name and its importance as a pilgrimage site. The priory was dissolved in the sixteenth century and most of its stone was removed for other buildings; what survives is freely accessible and often completely quiet.

The priory is in a park at the junction of St Oswald's Road and Archdeacon Street, a short walk from the city centre.

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A story
Aethelflaed of Mercia, who founded this priory around 900 AD, was one of the most remarkable figures of the early medieval period — a woman who ruled an Anglo-Saxon kingdom and led military campaigns against the Danes and Welsh at a time when female rulers were nearly unheard of. Her father was Alfred the Great. The priory she built here became an important centre of religious life in the region, and the bones of the Northumbrian king St Oswald were translated here from Bardney, which is how it got its name.

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