page_title: Odda's Chapel
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Odda's Chapel / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Chancel arch in Odda's chapel, Deerhurst, Gloucestershire
context_page_description: Odda's Chapel is a former chantry chapel at Deerhurst, Gloucestershire. It is an 11th-century late Anglo-Saxon building, completed a decade before the Norman Conquest of England.
  In the 16th century the chapel ceased to be used for worship and by the 17th century it was part of a farmhouse. It was rediscovered and restored late in the 19th century, and further restored in the 20th century. It is now managed by English Heritage.
  The chapel is the smaller of two Anglo-Saxon places of worship in Deerhurst. The larger and older is St Mary's Priory Church. Both buildings were part of a Benedictine priory, whose site is now a scheduled monument.
context_section_description: Earl Odda had the chapel built for the benefit of the soul of his brother Ælfric, who died on 22 December 1053. Ealdred, Bishop of Worcester consecrated it on 12 April 1056.
  The building has a nave and chancel, linked by a Romanesque chancel arch. A smaller Romanesque arch forms a doorway on the north side of the chapel. The nave has small windows high in the north and south walls.
  In the English Reformation in the 1540s Kings Henry VIII and Edward VI abolished chantries. Late in the 16th or early in the 17th century the chapel building was re-used as part of a timber-framed farmhouse, Abbot's Court, which was built against its east wall.
  The nave was converted into a kitchen. A first floor was inserted in the chancel. Three- and four-light domestic windows were inserted in the north and south walls of the chancel. In time the building's true age and its identity as a chapel were forgotten.
  In 1675 Sir John Powell, a local landowner, discovered near Deerhurst an 11th-century stone slab inscribed in Latin with the dedication of the chapel. It translates:
  "Earl Odda ordered this royal hall to be built and dedicated in honour of the Holy Trinity for the soul of his brother Ælfric, taken up from this place. Ealdred was the bishop who dedicated the building on the second day before Ides of April in the fourteenth year of the reign of Edward, king of the English".
  "Odda's Stone" is now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
caption: Chancel arch seen from the nave
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