St. Mary's Abbey Church, Nuneaton
The cache is placed a short distance from the church and will require stealth as the road is busy and there may be muggles nearby. Please don't compromise the cache.
The cache contains a log sheet only so you need to bring your own pen. You *MUST SIGN THE LOG SHEET* to claim a find. Any 'Found It' logs without signing the actual log sheet will be deleted.
The church is built on, and still incorporates, the ruins of the former Benedictine Priory.
Nuneaton Priory was a medieval Benedictine monastic house in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, initially founded in 1153 at Kintbury in Berkshire and was a daughter house of Fontevraud Abbey.
Nuneaton Priory must have become "denizen", that is, a naturalised English monastery, around the time of the suppression of the alien priories, since there was a prior of Nuneaton still in 1424 and other mentions are then found.
At various moments, the women's house at Nuneaton was large, containing 93 nuns in 1234, 89 in 1328, but the Black Death will have taken its toll and in any case the house numbered 46 nuns in 1370, about 40 in 1459, only 23 in 1507 and at the end, in 1539, 27 in total, of whom 25 were granted pensions.
The seal of Nuneaton Priory depicted the Virgin Mary in the pose of the Seat of Wisdom (Sedes sapientiae), which was a common motif for seals of nunneries in medieval England, though not the majority choice. The motif entails a depiction of the Blessed Virgin seated and facing forward, presenting or holding the Christ Child on her lap.
The nunnery was destroyed in 1539 during King Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries.
An ancient Abbey church founded at 'Eaton' in 1155 gave the present town the name 'Nuneaton'.
All that remained by the 19th Century of the original church were portions of the 12th- and 13th-century piers of the tower, the south wall of the south transept, and the foundations of the north transept and nave.
The Church has been partially restored. The nave was rebuilt in 1876 on the old foundations. The chancel was rebuilt in 1906, and then the north transept in 1931.
The church (such as it stands) is used as the Parish Church of St. Mary The Virgin and is known locally as the Abbey Church. The tradition of the church is Anglo-Catholic.
Despite this building's significance in Nuneaton's past and its recent history, it is a relatively unknown place, with little promotion or signage.
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