Ghosts · Oxfordshire

Madam Dudley's Ghost

Cumnor, near Oxford, where Cumnor Hall once stood

Spooky: for older readers

Cumnor Hall was a large four-sided house near Abingdon, built like a church, which had once belonged to the monks of Abingdon Abbey. In 1560 a lady was living there: Amy, the wife of Lord Robert Dudley, who later became Earl of Leicester. The village people called her Madam Dudley.

On Sunday the 8th of September that year there was a fair at Abingdon, and Lady Dudley ordered every one of her household to go to it. Her companion, Mrs Odingsell, objected that a Sunday was no day for decent folk to go to a fair. Her ladyship grew very angry and said that all her people should go. So they went, and only Lady Dudley and two other women were left in the house.

When the servants came home, they found their mistress dead at the foot of a flight of stairs.

A coroner's jury decided it had been an accident. But the country people round Cumnor never believed it. They were sure there had been foul play, and before long they were saying that Madam Dudley could not rest. Her ghost walked in Cumnor Park, and it walked so stubbornly that it took nine parsons from Oxford to lay her. At last they laid her in a pond, which was called Madam Dudley's Pond ever after. And the water in that pond, so the story went, was never known to freeze again.

Even nine parsons couldn't keep her down for ever. John Ingram wrote in 1884 that she still came back from time to time, and that a man would have to be brave, or foolish, to go walking at nightfall where she had walked. Long before that, William Julius Mickle had put it into a ballad:

And in that Manor now no moreIs cheerful feast and sprightly ball;For ever, since that dreary hour,Have spirits haunted Cumnor Hall.The village maids, with fearful glance,Avoid the ancient moss-grown wall;Nor ever lead the merry dance,Among the groves of Cumnor Hall.William Julius Mickle, “Cumnor Hall”, as quoted by Ingram

No plate yet. We are still looking for an old picture of this place.

What people said

Laid by nine parsons. The villagers said Madam Dudley's ghost “did use to walk in Cumnor Park”, so stubbornly that nine parsons from Oxford were needed to lay her.
The pond that never froze. She was laid in a pond called Madam Dudley's Pond, and the water there was never known to freeze afterwards.
She still walks. Ingram, writing in 1884, said that her ghost still came back now and then, despite the parsons.

Other tellings

A murder in a book. The idea that Amy was murdered was printed in Leicester's Commonwealth in 1584, a pamphlet against Dudley that the Privy Council condemned as a scandalous libel. Elias Ashmole repeated it in his Antiquities of Berkshire. Mickle took it from Ashmole for his ballad, and Walter Scott took it from Mickle.
Scott's version. In Walter Scott's novel Kenilworth (1821), Amy is locked in a lonely tower reached by a narrow drawbridge with a trap-door in it. The villain Varney gives the whistle she thinks is her husband's, and she runs out onto the trap-door and falls. Ingram calls this “dramatic but purely imaginative”, and it is: Scott made it up.
In the story Amy is often called the Countess of Leicester, but Dudley wasn't made Earl of Leicester until 1563, three years after she died.

What the history says

Amy Robsart was real. She married Robert Dudley publicly at Sheen in Surrey on 4 June 1550, and the boy king Edward VI noted the wedding in his diary. She died at Cumnor on 8 September 1560, and the coroner's jury found it was an accident. Ingram wrote that whether she fell by accident, took her own life or was pushed was “an unfathomable mystery”. [TODO: a modern history source for the inquest findings]

Cumnor Hall no longer stands. [TODO: confirm when the house was pulled down, and whether anything of it survives in Cumnor]

Cumnor was in Berkshire when these stories were told. It has been in Oxfordshire since 1974.

Go and See

Where: Cumnor village, west of Oxford. The pin marks St Michael's Church. [TODO: where Cumnor Hall stood, and whether the site can be seen from a public path]
Access: [TODO: church opening times]
Allow: Half an hour to walk round the village and church.
Families: A spooky tale about a real woman's death, best for older children and grown-ups. There's nothing frightening to see, only a quiet village.

51.7340° N, 1.3331° W · Open in OpenStreetMap

Make a day of it

From our sister sites

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Sources

John H. Ingram, The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain (illustrated edition, 1897), “Cumnor Hall”, drawing on Canon J. E. Jackson's paper “Amye Robsart” (1877). Our main source. Internet Archive. [TODO: name the earliest record of the nine parsons and the pond that Ingram drew on]
William Julius Mickle, “Cumnor Hall” (18th-century ballad), as quoted by Ingram.
Sir Walter Scott, Kenilworth (1821), as summarised by Ingram.

This is a legend, told as people told it. Spotted something wrong? Tell us.