Abingdon Berkshire Lewis Topographical Dictionary of England 1845
Tue, April 7 ABINGDON, a borough and market-town, having exclusive jurisdiction, and the head of a union, locally in the hundred of HORMER, county of BERKS, of which it is the county town, 6 miles (S.) from Oxford, 26 (N. W. by N.) from Reading, and 56 (W.N. W.) from London ; containing, exclusively of that part of the parish of St. Helen which is in the hundred of Hormer, 5585 inhabitants; of which number 4947 are in the parish of St. Helen, and 638 in that of St. Nicholas. This place, according to a manuscript in the Cottonian library, quoted by Dugdale, was, in the time of the Britons, a city of considerable importance, and distinguished as a royal residence, to which the people resorted to assist at the great councils of the nation. By the Saxons it was called Scovechesham, or Sewsham, but acquired the name of Abbendon, ” the town of the abbey,” on the removal hither, in 680, of a monastic institution previously founded at Bagley Wood, now an extra-parochial liberty in the vicinity, by Cissa, viceroy of Centwine, ninth king of Wessex, on which Ceadwalla, his son and successor, bestowed the town and its appendages. After the establishment of the monastery, Offa, King of Mercia, on a visit to Abingdon, was so much pleased with the situation, that he erected a palace here, in which he and his immediate successors, Egferth and Cenwulf, occasionally resided.
