This is how Tudor Abingdon may have looked – as depicted by a diorama model at the County Hall Museum.
A new exhibition about Tudor Abingdon has just opened in the museum.
There are a number of Tudor mannequins with Tudor-style cloths, and a variety of artifacts and manuscripts dating from that time – many from Abingdon.
There are even two lots of stocks. One lot look authentic. But there are some more recently made stocks for fun use.
I once got bored and superimposed an image of Wells cathedral on the site where the abbey once stood, same scale. Result is here if anyone's interested.
Did we have a town hall on stilts back then?
Its supposd to have been similar in size to Wells Cathedral – I have seen another picture (in the Old Abbey Buildings I think) which suggests a similar scale.
The bit that surprised me was the suggestion that there was a building with an arcade underneath on the site of the present County Hall. Does anyone know if there is any basis for that or is it just supposition that they would have had some sort of market hall there?
That picture is very striking – would the abbey really have been that big???