210 Edington Church. 
The Rectory of Edington belonged to the Abbey of Romsey, of 
which the Rector was a Resident Prebendary, and the parochial 
duties, with the services in the Church (the predecessor of the 
building under notice) were discharged by a Vicar. About the 
year 1300 William of Edington (whose surname is unknown) was 
born in the village whose name he adopted; after education at 
Oxford, and having held two previous livings, he, in 1322, became 
Rector of Middleton Cheney, in Oxfordshire. In 1345 he was, by 
Royal favour, appointed to the See of Winchester, and shortly 
afterwards made Lord High Chancellor of England. In the last 
year of his life, 1366, Bishop Edington was nominated Archbishop 
of Canterbury, which office, however, he declined, probably on ac- 
count of infirmity. 
Soon after his consecration to Winchester he appears to have set 
about improving the state of the Church in his native parish of 
Edington. He first (in 1351) arranged with the Abbess of Romsey 
for the establishment at Edington of a Collegiate Body of Secular 
Priests under a Warden. But a short time after this, at the special 
request of the Black Prince, he converted his College into a Monas- 
tery of the Augustinian Order of “ Bonhommes,” and built the 
present Church. [There was a previous parish Church on the same 
site, and during the recent restoration, the base, of late Norman 
character, of the west respond of the south arcade was discovered 7m 
situ, and opened out. ‘This appears to have been the starting-point 
in setting out the new, and larger, Church—the corresponding 
respond of which stands on the old one.] 
Leland gives the following extracts from a certain Latin book of 
Edington Monastery :— 
“3rd July A.D. 13852. was laid the first stone of the Monastery 
of Edindon.” 
: « A.D. 1861. The Conventual Church of Edindon was dedicated 
by Robert Wyville Bishop of Sarum to the honour of St. James 
the Apostle, S. Katharine and All Saints.” 
[Canon Jackson states: ‘‘ St. James the Apostle, as one of the 
saints to whom the Church was dedicated, may have been an error 
of Leland’s copying. In the foundation charter, printed in the New 
