Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Serie: The 50
- Sprache: Englisch
Britain is well-known for its churches and cathedrals; buildings of great architecture and religious grandeur that form many of our recognisable skylines. But these grand structures are also full of facts, histories and stories that you may not have been aware of. Did you know that there are only three cathedrals in Britain without a ringing bell? Or that St Davids Cathedral, nestled away in a Welsh valley, has a very unique choir, where the top line is sung only by female choristers, aged eight to eighteen? How about that the Great Pyramids in Egypt were the world's tallest structures for over 3,870 years, until the construction of Lincoln Cathedral in 1311? Award-wining travel writer and editor Sue Dobson takes us on a journey around the United Kingdom, showing us her highlights while providing fascinating details and stories along the way.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 293
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sue Dobson is an award-winning travel writer and magazine editor with a passion for discovering the world, its art, music, religions and cultures. A lifetime of travelling has taken her through all seven continents and her work is published in guidebooks, magazines and online. Home is a pretty village in the English countryside, but she’s never happier than when out exploring – churches and cathedrals being high on her list of ‘must-sees’. She is a member of the British Guild of Travel Writers and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
DISCLAIMER
The descriptions given in these articles are for general guidance only, and should not be used as a substitute for a proper travel guide or route plan. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss, injury or damage allegedly arising from any information contained in this book.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Towering over the landscape, masterpieces of art and architecture, churches and cathedrals are among the finest buildings in Britain. Vibrant places of worship, they provide a unique record of the nation’s history and heritage. Many can trace their beginnings to Anglo-Saxon times and millions of us visit them every year.
In a show of power after the Conquest of 1066, the Normans set about constructing castles and building or rebuilding abbeys and cathedrals in strategic locations in England. Built in the Romanesque style from northern France, they were breathtaking technical achievements, vast in size and featuring massive columns and rounded, semi-circular arches to support the weight of heavy roofs. The great piers that line the nave at Durham Cathedral are always one of the abiding memories its visitors take home.
Then during the 12th century a new style emerged, again from northern France, with sophisticated techniques that would reduce the weight on walls via pointed arches, ribbed vaults and flying buttresses, allowing for more window space and opening up a raft of technical and engineering possibilities.
This Gothic incarnation would be developed down the centuries as architects and masons created ever-more daring and complex designs. Buildings rose to dizzying heights and decoration became more and more detailed and ornate.
As cathedrals were built over lengthy periods, their construction often halted by fire or plague (or both), not to mention collapsing towers, so new styles were incorporated as fashions in architecture changed. The emphasis was always on height and light, often through windows filled with stained glass that brought Bible stories to life for the first time. With their walls covered in frescoes and statues brightly painted, they would have been filled with colour and life.
Salisbury Cathedral is unique in that it was built in one style, Early English Gothic, over a period of just 38 years from 1220. When window tracery became more complicated and decoration richer, this evolved into what became known as Decorated Gothic style, Exeter Cathedral being a prime example.
Perpendicular Gothic followed and was unique to England. Arches were flattened, huge windows inserted in slimmer walls, ceilings became a maze of ribs but most spectacular of all was the fan vaulting, seen in all its breathtaking glory in Gloucester Cathedral’s cloisters and in the ceilings of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge and Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford.
Then came King Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the Reformation. There were an estimated 1,000 abbeys in England and Wales during the Middle Ages and Henry’s Dissolution of the Monasteries closed most of them. Stripped of their valuables they were plundered for their stone.
The ruins of some of the great abbey churches remain as monuments of national importance, such as at Glastonbury, Whitby and Tintern. Others survived to become parish churches and continue their role among the communities that bought them, for example Tewkesbury, Romsey and Sherborne. The King saved a few by establishing new dioceses and refounding their monastic abbeys as cathedrals – think Peterborough, Gloucester and Bristol.
While the effects of the Reformation intensified under King Edward VI and his archbishop Thomas Cranmer, worse was to come. With the English Civil War came an era of destruction and desecration by the iconoclasts. Yet somehow these buildings survived to rise again, stumbling badly along the way, and it was essentially thanks to the Victorians in the 19th century that we have the great cathedrals we see today.
One name that appears time and again throughout this book is Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811–78). A keen interpreter of the Gothic Revival style of architecture, he worked on nearly 200 churches, abbeys and cathedrals, either building or restoring them. On his death, his son John Oldrid Scott took up the baton. Despite his prodigious work on ecclesiastical buildings, he is probably best known as the architect of the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park and the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel.
With the formation of new Anglican dioceses in the late- 19th and early 20th centuries, a new cathedral for Cornwall was built in Truro and several former parish churches became cathedrals, among them Chelmsford and St Edmundsbury.
Ancient cathedrals and churches can tell a story but so, too, can modern buildings, albeit rather different. Guildford Cathedral’s post-war ‘Buy-A-Brick’ campaign is remembered by families throughout the land and despite the tortuous evolution of Liverpool’s much-decried Catholic cathedral, it is now a firm local favourite and high on the ‘must-see’ list for thousands of tourists enjoying the revitalised city.
What makes a Christian church a cathedral has nothing to do with size. Situated at the heart of a diocese, a cathedral is a bishop’s church. It is the site of the bishop’s chair (cathedra, from the Latin for chair) or throne, symbol of the bishop’s (or in some cases archbishop’s) ecclesiastical and spiritual authority.
Cathedrals and churches are treasure houses of art and history, testimony to the skills of engineers and mathematicians, stonemasons and sculptors, carpenters and woodcarvers, fresco painters and stained-glass artists down the centuries. So they remain today, as talented craftspeople work quietly behind the scenes, conserving, repairing and restoring the fabric.
They are also the source of wonderful music, their choirs often world-renowned. The Three Choirs Festival, alternating between the cathedrals of Worcester, Gloucester and Hereford, is one of the highlights of the musical year.
Although they are a window on the past they are also very much of the ‘now’ and constantly look to the future, always conscious of their role as a place of worship and care for the community. The new millennium has seen many a parish church fundraising to install access for all, toilets and a kitchen, while reordering space to make it more flexible.
Major projects at cathedrals include visitor information and welcome centres, good cafés and restaurants, meeting rooms, conference and educational centres, with their naves and chapels often providing the setting for talks, concerts, dinners and events. Some new building developments, as at Norwich and Southwark Cathedrals, have won awards for their architecture.
New works of art and stained-glass windows by contemporary artists and sculptors have been, and continue to be, commissioned. The spectacular ‘living water’ font at Salisbury Cathedral, the stunning corona over the altar in Hereford’s cathedral and John Piper’s brilliant tapestries at Chichester are truly memorable. The ongoing decoration of Westminster Cathedral means it displays some of the very finest contemporary ecclesiastical art and craftsmanship.
Standing ‘at the still point of the turning world’ churches and cathedrals are places where, in beautiful, awe-inspiring surroundings, tourists, pilgrims and locals alike can find spiritual refreshment. I hope the following pages will inspire you to visit and to make discoveries of your own.
THE 50 GREATEST CHURCHES AND CATHEDRALS OF GREAT BRITAIN
BATH ABBEY
At the heart of the city’s busy shopping streets, in a piazza of cafés and milling crowds, Bath’s magnificent Abbey Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul presents a story in stone like no other. Its unique west front has angels clambering up ladders (and occasionally slipping down a rung or two) alongside columns of supporting saints and Christ sitting in Majesty between turrets at the top. A statue of King Henry VII watches over the door.
So great is the sense of beauty and unity of the architecture within, that it comes as a surprise to discover that the Abbey’s nave and aisles are actually Victorian, albeit a replica of Tudor design. The glorious fan vaulting that carries the eye the full length of the church seems all of a piece, but only the chancel vault originates from the 16th century.
The story of the Abbey goes back into the mists of time – there was even a site of worship here in pre-Christian times. Although little is known about the Benedictine Anglo-Saxon abbey, it is recorded that King Edgar the Peaceful was crowned in Bath in 973.
The form of that service, devised by St Dunstan, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, has formed the basis of all coronation services down the centuries, including that of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. This pivotal moment in history is commemorated in the Edgar Window at the end of the north aisle.
The Norman conquerors began an extensive building programme in the early 1090s. The bishopric had been at nearby Wells in 1088 when John of Tours was made Bishop of Wells. A few years later he was granted the city of Bath, the abbey and monastic buildings, and promptly set grand plans into motion.
Not only would the bishopric be moved to Bath, he would extend the monastery, build a bishop’s palace and replace the Saxon abbey with a massive new cathedral. After his death, the work continued under Bishop Robert of Lewes, with the cathedral completed in the 1160s. It was so vast that today’s Abbey would fit into its nave.
Bath’s importance declined when the bishops made Wells their principal seat of residence during the 13th century. The monks found the upkeep of the buildings difficult and by the time of the Black Death in 1398, which decimated their numbers, it had become impossible. The great cathedral descended into decay.
When Oliver King, Bishop of Bath and Wells, arrived in 1495, tradition tells that he had a dream in which he saw angels ascending and descending ladders to heaven and heard a voice telling him to build a new church. This has since been dismissed as a marketing myth, conjured by a desperate fundraiser a century after Bishop King’s death, but building began and the angels keep their secrets on the west front.
The bishop commissioned King Henry VII’s finest master masons, Robert and William Vertue, to build in the Perpendicular Gothic style. They promised him ‘the finest vault in England’ (and went on to work at Westminster Abbey). The building was in use but not completed when Prior Holloway and fourteen monks surrendered it to King Henry VIII in 1539.
Looted, the stained glass ripped out and destroyed, the lead stripped from its roof, the shell was sold on to local gentry. In 1572 it was presented to the City Corporation and citizens of Bath for use as their parish church. The nave was given a simple roof and the east end used for services. Houses soon surrounded it and the north aisle became a public passageway.
By the early 19th century Bath Abbey was again in dire straits. Three restorations took place under the city architect but it was Charles Kemble, appointed Rector in 1859, who really came to the rescue.
He commissioned the noted Gothic Revival architect Sir George Gilbert Scott to draw up plans for a complete restoration – and funded much of it himself. Work began in 1864 and transformed the interior, resulting in the aweinspiring church we see today.
Scott looked to Bishop King’s vision and the work of the Tudor master masons, so meticulously matching the design of their fan vaulting in his nave that you have to look very carefully to see the joins. When the Abbey reopened in 1871, Scott felt he had completed the building as the medieval craftsmen had intended.
Pointed arches and flying buttresses enabled the late Perpendicular builders to maximise window areas. In Bath Abbey they occupy some 80 per cent of the wall space and the Victorian stained-glass artists and glaziers filled them well.
The great east window, which depicts 56 events in the life of Christ, from the Annunciation to the Ascension, rises to the full height of the wall and contains 818 square feet (76 square metres) of glass. Partially destroyed by air raids in 1942, it was repaired by the great grandson of the original designer.
The great west window – known as a Pentateuch Window because it tells of stories and events from the first five books of the Bible – ascends in three tiers, from the creation of Eve up to the Passover when the Israelites were delivered from slavery in Egypt.
The nave and quire aisles are lined with memorial tablets – 641 of them, only Westminster Abbey has more – and on the floors are 891 grave slabs (ledger stones) dating from 1625 to 1845. As well as recording the name and dates of the person buried there, many of these contain interesting inscriptions about the person, their family and their life in the local community.
Abbey benefactors get their place in the limelight, none more so than John Montague, Bishop of Bath and Wells in 1608, who donated a tidy sum for the nave to be roofed after the king’s commissioners had left it open to the elements. His effigy-topped table tomb is grandly placed behind iron railings between the north aisle and the nave.
In the 18th century, the north transept was where the city housed a fire engine. Now it is home to the renowned Klais Organ, installed in 1997. The delightful frieze of twelve angel musicians, carved in lime wood, was added above the quire screens ten years later.
Do take a closer look. Each angel has its own definite character and the designer, sculptor Paul Fletcher, had a sense of humour. Two violinists face each other as if playing a duet, one using her wings to shield her ears from the bagpipes next to her. Only the cellist is looking towards the conductor, and she has her eyes closed.
The 20th century saw restoration and additions and now Footprint, an ambitious £19.3 million building programme started in 2018, has been designed to bring the Abbey firmly into the 21st century.
Crucially it involves the repairing and stabilising of the floor, which is collapsing, and installing an eco-friendly heating system that utilises the energy from Bath’s famous hot springs. By building underground it opens up new spaces to provide such important facilities as toilets, a café and meeting rooms. There’ll also be a purpose-built Song School and a Discovery Centre to tell the Abbey’s story. As for the completion date, that’s likely to be 2021 at the earliest.
BEVERLEY MINSTER
From its sheer size and impressive architecture – it’s said that its beautiful west front was the model for that of Westminster Abbey – you could be forgiven for thinking that Beverley Minster is a cathedral. It is larger than many English cathedrals (and more impressive than some) but in fact it is a parish church, one of three in this busy market town in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Its title of Minster goes back to its foundation as an important Anglo-Saxon missionary teaching church, from where the canons went out to preach among neighbouring parishes.
It is hard to imagine that such a magnificent building was destined for destruction in 1548 during King Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Thankfully a group of the town’s wealthy businessmen bought the Collegiate Church of St John the Evangelist for its continued parochial use. Best known today as Beverley Minster, it is the Parish Church of St John and St Martin.
Beverley is often compared with its bigger sister, York Minster (page 258). They were built around the same time, from creamy white limestone quarried near Tadcaster and probably by the same masons. Less imposing it may be, but Beverley has an elegance and beauty all of its own.
Its twin west towers soaring skywards, the exterior of the building with its flying buttresses and arcading, statues set in canopied niches and the elaborate tracery of its windows, all hint at the glories to be discovered within.
The Minster owes its existence to St John of Beverley, who died in 721 and was canonised in 1037. Today his remains lie in a vault beneath the nave. A renowned preacher and evangelist, John was Bishop of York when he founded a monastery to retire to in what was then a remote, uninhabited spot. The town of Beverley grew up around it and thrived.
Miracles were attributed to him, ensuring a constant flow of pilgrims to his tomb and shrine. King Athelstan, grandson of Alfred the Great, credited John of Beverley with his victory at the decisive Battle of Brunanburh in 937. In thanksgiving he granted the Saxon church important rights and privileges and established a college of canons. When King Henry V triumphed at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, he attributed his success to St John and made him one of the patron saints of the royal family.
This is the third church on the site (little remains of its Saxon and Norman predecessors). Construction began in 1190 and continued for the next two centuries, its architecture encompassing the three main Gothic styles: Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular.
You enter through the door of the Highgate Porch, its carved triangular portico watched over by the seated Christ flanked by the twelve Apostles. Light floods the long nave, a vista of white limestone and polished Purbeck Marble, elegant arches, complex arcading and, stretching the full length of the Minster, a pale stone vault with painted tracery highlighting the gilded stone bosses.
Look back to the great west window, depicting the story of Christianity in the north of England, and below it, the magnificent west doorway. Tiers of stone statues under delicate canopies flank the flowing lines of a finely carved ogee arch, crowned by the figure of St John of Beverley. The carvings on the oak doors are of the Four Evangelists and their symbols, created, like the extraordinary canopy that tops the Norman font, in 1728 by the Thornton family of York.
Ahead, the high altar can be seen framed by the central arch of the oak screen that separates the nave from the chancel. Richly carved with saints, bishops and musical connotations, it supports the fine organ, its casing equally ornate, its pipes splendidly coloured.
In the medieval period, Beverley was the centre of secular music in the north of England. The Minster’s collection of over 70 medieval musician carvings in stone and wood, believed to be the largest in the world, has been the source of much of our knowledge of early musical instruments.
Many are at the base of the arches in the north aisle and atop pillars in the nave, but they are dotted all around the building as if tempting the visitor to seek them out. They show about twenty different instruments, including bagpipes, fiddles, trumpets, flutes, pipes, shawms and cymbals.
The quire and its early 16th-century carved wood quire stalls are one of Beverley Minster’s great glories. In the back row, tall canopies soar into a forest of pinnacles and crocketed spires while kings, saints and bishops stand proud above a lacy woodland of foliage and faces.
The ends of the stalls are carved with strange creatures and poppyheads, and beneath the seats is the largest set of misericords in any church in the country, 68 in all. Under each ledge that supported weary monks during long services, whole scenes of medieval life are portrayed in fine detail and often with a sense of humour or irony.
Originally built in around 1340 the quire has had a tortuous history. Mutilated and defaced, plastered over, hidden, then restored and rebuilt in 1826, like a picture gallery its niches are filled with mosaics of the twelve Apostles and saints, flanked at the base by stone figures associated with the life of St John of Beverley. A winding staircase leads to a platform at the top of the reredos where the saint’s shrine, richly embellished in gold and silver, was placed, centre stage for all to see.
The unusual trompe l’oeil floor of the quire, laid in the 18th century, gives the illusion of raised stepping-stones. It leads the eye to the high altar and behind it, the magnificent stone-carved reredos.
Alongside the altar is a plain, polished stone sanctuary chair, or frith stool, that dates from the earliest days of the Saxon monastery and is one of only two still in existence. The right of sanctuary for fugitives, given to the town of Beverley by King Athelstan, was abolished under King Henry VIII.
Adjacent to the high altar in the north quire aisle, the exquisitely carved 14th-century canopy of the Percy tomb is considered the jewel in Beverley’s not inconsiderable crown. The Percys were one of the richest and most powerful families in the north and the tomb is believed to be that of Lady Eleanor Percy who died in 1328.
A masterpiece of the stone carvers’ art – five master masons are said to have worked on it – it rises majestically in a flurry of figures, fruit and foliage. At the pinnacle on the north side, angels bearing the instruments of the Passion attend the risen Christ; on the south side, Christ receives the soul of the dead person into heaven. The whole canopy, a medieval view of paradise, somehow survived the Reformation and the Civil War and remains remarkably intact.
Also in the north aisle, the well-worn steps of a double staircase once led up to the chapter house, used by the college of canons. It was demolished when no longer required after the dissolution of the monastery, the stone sold to fund the purchase and preservation of the Minster.
The east window contains most of the medieval glass that survived the Reformation. It watches over the retroquire where pilgrims would have passed to get as close as possible to St John’s shrine. Look for the superb vaulting and splendid use of Purbeck Marble in the fine arcading. A single lancet window and accompanying copper sculptures, designed in 2004 by Helen Whittaker and known as the Pilgrim Window, have created a space for meditation and prayer.
That the Minster is so magnificent today owes much to two periods of restoration. In the early 18th century the church, neglected and decaying, was listing badly, with the north transept wall leaning four feet out into the street. Advice on how to save it was sought from the renowned architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, best known for his work with Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh, and as the designer of six London churches.
An ingenious way of righting the structure was devised. Using a wooden cradle, ropes and pulleys, over eleven days the entire wall was pulled back upright. Although many of Hawksmoor’s additions and renovations were removed during the 19th century, the fine stone floor in the nave and his dazzling geometric marble pavement in the chancel remain, as does the central tower, which he rebuilt in brick to replace the crumbling stone.
If you stand by St John of Beverley’s grave at the top of the nave and look up, you’ll see a large central boss painted in red and gold. Carved not from stone but from wood, it covers a hole in the vault through which building materials were hauled up into the roof space of the tower via a massive wooden treadmill crane. Installed in the 18th century, it was operated by a workman walking, hamster-like, inside the wheel. You can see it if you take the roof tour.
From the mid-19th century massive restoration work took place, much of it under the guidance of Sir George Gilbert Scott, who designed the organ screen (carved by James Elwell of Beverley, who later became the town’s mayor). The stained-glass windows are Victorian and memorable, made by the finest stained-glass artists and manufacturers of the era. The windows in all ten bays of the nave aisles pair an event in the life of Christ with one from the Old Testament and repay a close look.
Continuing its long traditions as a place of sanctuary and great music, Beverley Minster lives up to its promise as ‘a space for the soul and a feast for eyes and ears’.
BRISTOL CATHEDRAL
Founded as St Augustine’s Abbey in 1140, the Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity gained cathedral status in 1542. After the dissolution of the monastery three years earlier, King Henry VIII created the new Diocese of Bristol after, it is said, much lobbying by the citizens of what was by then the most important trading city in England after London. The discovery of a large Anglo-Saxon carved stone during 19th-century rebuilding work, now placed in the south transept, indicates that this had been a Christian site before the Conquest.
There are remains today of the Norman abbey, notably the Abbey Gatehouse on the south side of College Green and the remarkable chapter house, reached from the cathedral cloister, which is a Romanesque gem. With its walls, arches, arcading and vaults so richly carved and intricately patterned in complex geometric designs, it resembles a vast tapestry in stone.
The monastery for Augustinian Canons was founded by a wealthy Bristol merchant and landowner, Robert Fitzharding, the first Lord Berkeley. For the next four centuries the Berkeley family continued their patronage, with most of Fitzharding’s successors being buried there. Look for the effigies of Berkeley Lords Thomas and Maurice who were implicated in the rebellion against King Edward II, murdered at their castle.
Built in the early 14th century to replace the Norman abbey, the east end of the cathedral is glorious. The vaulted ceilings of the nave, quire and aisles are all the same height, making it one of the finest examples of a medieval hall church to be seen anywhere. Spacious and light, it was a style favoured in German cathedrals but not often seen in this country. In the quire aisles, the innovative vaulting, its sinuous lines springing from little bridges, is unique to Bristol.
The cathedral has two Lady Chapels. The first, known as the Elder Lady Chapel, was built around 1220 and the carving was the work of masons ‘on loan’ from Wells Cathedral (page 232). There are interesting little figures in the spandrels, including a fox carrying a goose, sheep musicians and numerous little monkeys.
Originally standing apart from the church, it was incorporated into the north quire aisle during the late 13th-and early 14th-century rebuilding, when the red sandstone Eastern Lady Chapel was designed, at the same time and in the same style as the quire. The chapel was given its Gothic colours by the art historian E.W. Tristram in 1935, in a revival of its original splendour. Effigy tombs of 15th-century abbots line the walls.
Framed by the lilting lines of five-pointed stars, stellate tomb recesses are another unique and attractive feature of the cathedral. Their design owes more to the East than the West and as Bristol was an important trading port at the time, and the monks had their own quayside at the harbour, it’s likely that ideas for such fine architectural details travelled back with the ships.
Off the south quire aisle, the little sacristy is full of decorative stonework and one of its niches once held an oven for baking communion bread. An unusual doorway leads to the Berkeley Chapel, which has the finest of all the starburst tomb niches. Here you’ll find a cathedral treasure, a medieval candelabrum from 1460 crowned by the Virgin Mary and Child. Beneath her St George, clad in the armour of the period, slays the dragon. It came from Bristol’s Temple Church, bombed in 1940.
The nave was being rebuilt when the abbey was dissolved by King Henry VIII’s commissioners in 1539 and left in ruins, its stone used to build houses right up to the church. It wasn’t until the 1860s that a new nave was constructed and the cathedral restored to its original size.
This was the work of the Victorian ecclesiastical architect G. E. Street, in the Gothic Revival style. Partly using the original plans, he wished to marry up the nave with the architecture of the east end, so only the sharp-eyed will discern the Victorian from the medieval. The result is long vistas and a beautiful, light-filled cathedral.
The west front and twin bell towers were added in 1888 by another renowned ecclesiastical architect, John Loughborough Pearson, who designed Truro Cathedral (page 224). He also added the elegant stone-carved quire screen, the fine stone reredos behind the high altar and the pulpit, all perfectly in keeping with the original medieval setting.
New windows were added in the 20th century, some commemorating the roles local people played during the Bristol blitz of 1941. The first 32 women priests in the Church of England were ordained at Bristol Cathedral in March 1994.
BUCKFAST ABBEY
On the edge of Dartmoor, in a gloriously green valley of the River Dart, St Mary’s Abbey at Buckfast is a tranquil oasis just off the traffic-roaring Devon Expressway. The only English medieval monastery to be restored and used again for its original purpose, its story is remarkable.
King Cnut founded the original abbey in 1018. Built of wood, it was smaller than most Benedictine monasteries of the time and, judging from the entry in the Domesday Book survey of 1086, a good deal less prosperous.
It was probably in severe decline by 1136 when King Stephen, who sought to revive English monasteries, gave it to the Abbot of Savigny in southern Normandy. Eleven years later, all the Savigniac houses were absorbed into the mighty Cistercian Order. With it came great change.
While life under the Cistercian Rule was austere, the whole monastery and its church were rebuilt in stone on a large scale, with gates to the north and south for travellers to enter through. It grew in importance and wealth, its precincts busy with work and trade. Admitted to the guild of Totnes merchants, the abbey exported large amounts of wool to Italy.
The monks welcomed pilgrims and the merchants who followed the packhorse route through the region. They fished the River Dart, grew rich from the wool trade and farmed the manorial lands. The abbey was also a noted centre of learning and scholarship.
In 1215, King John named the Abbot of Buckfast as custodian of the Crown Jewels. In 1297, Edward I stayed at the abbey, accompanied by a large retinue of soldiers, servants, courtiers and advisors.
More buildings were added. By the 15th century there was a guest hall, a luxurious abbot’s lodging where important visitors were entertained and a separate almshouse to care for the needy. The monks ran a school and established fairs and markets to encourage local trade.
After the death of Abbot John Rede in 1535, the last of a long line of abbots all elected by the monks, Gabriel Donne, a close friend of Thomas Cromwell, was imposed on the, by now dwindling, community. He sold off much property, putting in train the process of dissolution.
Two of the king’s commissioners and their lawyers arrived in February 1539 to complete the closure. Abbot Gabriel Donne, who signed the deed of surrender, was well rewarded. Over a period of just four months, the commissioners closed 40 West Country monasteries and delivered one and a half tons of gold, gilt and silver to the Tower of London and into the king’s coffers.
The abbey’s land and estates also fell to the Crown. The manor of Buckfast itself, including its abbey church, was granted to Sir Thomas Denys, a prominent lawyer who amassed great wealth from the estates he acquired after the Dissolution. It remained in his family for 250 years.
Demolition work began immediately and the shell of the monastery was left to crumble. Some of the smaller buildings in the precincts were put to different uses, the almshouse for wool dyeing and the guest hall converted into cottages and a farm. During the 18th century it was a favourite spot for artists who found the ruin romantic.
When mill-owner Samuel Berry bought the site in 1800, he cleared what remained of the rubble in order to build a Gothic-style, castellated mansion, but kept the tower from the abbot’s lodgings and 12th-century undercroft. The mansion changed hands four times until, in 1882, its owner decided to sell it, preferably to a religious community.
The advertisement he placed in a Catholic magazine described it as ‘a grand acquisition could it be restored to its original purpose.’ It was seen by exiled Benedictine monks, who had fled from persecution in France and were living in Ireland.
They lost no time in buying it and set about improving their new monastery’s buildings, restoring the abbot’s tower and erecting a temporary church (now the chapter house). This was opened in 1884, the year they started work on building a kitchen, refectory and cloister.
In 1903, exactly 365 years after the closure of the original monastery, Boniface Natter was blessed as Abbot. After the ceremony, a cheque for £1,000 was found in the collection basket. This paid for the completion of the west wing, providing much-needed bedrooms.
However, Abbot Natter’s greatest wish was to rebuild the Cistercian abbey. One of the monks had discovered part of the medieval foundations while digging in the vegetable garden and subsequently the rest of the foundations were uncovered. An architect drew up plans for the restoration in the style of the mid-12th century, based on studies of other Cistercian abbeys such as Fountains (page 78), incorporating pointed windows and rounded arches.
Tragically, Abbot Natter drowned in a shipwreck in 1906. His successor, the 30-year-old Anscar Vonier, vowed to bring Natter’s wish to fruition. The project leader would be Brother Peter Schrode, who had learned the art of masonry in France, and in January 1907, Abbot Vonier laid the first stone.
For the next 32 years, the builders – usually four monks, never more than six – worked ceaselessly to complete the large church, literally by hand. They began in the traditional way, with the east end, the sanctuary, transepts and two bays of the nave.
