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Battle Abbey was built on the orders of William the Conqueror, in penance for the bloodshed, on the traditional site of where some of the fiercest fighting during the Battle of Hastings took place on 14th October 1066. The high altar is supposed to mark the spot where Harold, last King of the English Saxons, fell. The abbey was dissolved and largely ruined in 1558. It then became a country house and, later, a school. The school is still there and not normally open to the public, but the abbey ruins, which include store rooms and wonderful vaulted ceilings, can be visited and there is a particularly fine 14th century gatehouse.
The abbey is managed by English Heritage alongside the battlefield of 1066.
The ruins of Bayham Old Abbey are relatively remote – and would have been even more so when it was founded in 1208 by Robert de Thurnham, for the Premonstratensian order of ‘white canons’. The abbey existed for 300 years until being dissolved by Cardinal Wolsey in 1525. Wolsey wanted to use its endowments for other causes, such as founding colleges. The closure provoked local fury. On 4 June 1525 over a hundred men with painted faces, armed with longbows, crossbows, swords and clubs, assembled at the abbey in an attempt to reinstate the evicted canons. They stormed the abbey gatehouse and temporarily restored the community, but it made no difference. The estate was eventually sold off and the buildings were left to decay. The Pratt family bought the estate in 1714 and part of their house overlooks the ruins.
Bayham is reckoned to be the best surviving example of a Premonstratensian abbey in England. There are extensive, and interesting, ruins in a picturesque setting. The abbey church is distinctly narrow – a hallmark of the Premonstratensians, apparently.
Little Bayham
Nr Lamberhurst
The ruins of Castle Acre Priory are impressive and extensive. They include a virtually complete west range with the prior's lodging and several wonderful features - including a ceiling with original painted Tudor roses. There's also an exhibition and a herb garden.
King's Lynn
The flint ruins of the crossing arch from Creake Abbey’s church are pretty much all that remains of a medieval Augustinian house. And it’s a sad tale. The abbey probably began as a small chapel founded in 1206 by Sir Robert and Lady Alice de Nerford. In 1217, they established a hospital of St Bartholomew there, which developed into a priory dedicated to the rule of St Augustine. A devastating fire in about 1484 left the place much reduced. Then, early in the 16th century, the plague struck; one by one, the canons died until only the abbot remained. When he too died, alone on 12 December 1506, the abbey closed. The cloister and monastic buildings became a private house and the south wall of the old nave is now the garden wall.
Under separate management, Creake Abbey is also home to a small retail complex, with a café, food hall and farmers’ market.
North Creake
Fakenham
Croyland, or Crowland, Abbey was a monastery first founded in the early 8th C by Ethelbald, King of Mercia from 716-757, on the site of the hermitage of St Guthlac. It was destroyed by the Danes in 866 and re-founded as a Benedictine abbey in the mid-tenth century. From the 10th to the 15th centuries the monastic buildings were extended and rebuilt and the abbey was one of the wealthiest in East Anglia. It was dissolved in 1539 and the monastic buildings demolished, with the exception of the nave and aisles of the abbey church which were taken into use as the parish church. During the 17th C Civil War, the church served as a Royalist stronghold, defended by earthworks. The nave and south aisle of the church fell into disrepair in the 18th C and parish use became restricted to the north aisle, which remains the case today. Both the existing church and ruins have some fascinating features. As well as the visible remains, the site is also important as that of a pre-conquest monastery, the buried remains of the Anglo-Saxon hermitage and monastery, the medieval monastic buildings and the Civil War defences.
Crowland is also known as the likely home of the Croyland Chronicle, a unique primary source for English medieval history.
Crowland
Peterborough
Culross Abbey was founded by Malcolm, earl of Fife in 1217-1218 as a daughter house of the Cistercian monastery at Kinloss. The abbey church was built soon after, with work continuing into the 1300s. The abbey had a reputation for producing fine books, but monastic life came to an end with the Reformation of 1560. The choir and presbytery of the abbey church were taken over as the parish church, but most of the abbey buildings fell into ruin, so little remains. What there is is fascinating, however (including a climb up a ladder into the remains of the vaulted refectory). The church itself is cruciform and contains several items of particular interest. Probably the most impressive is the Bruce Vault, built in 1642, which houses the marble memorial to Sir George Bruce, builder of Culross Palace, and his wife. The memorial includes eight kneeling statues, representing the couple's children, in front of the memorial. There are also the effigies of a knight in armour and a lady, John Stewart of Innermeath, Lord of Lorn, and his wife, dating from 1445 but badly defaced during the Reformation.
There are rumours of ghosts. And a legend of a tunnel beneath the abbey, where a man in a golden chair sits waiting to give valuable treasures to anyone who succeeds in finding him.
Culross
The ruins of Glastonbury Abbey are associated with two famous legends: firstly that Joseph of Arimathea visited Glastonbury in the 1st century AD, planting his staff which grew into a thorn tree and, secondly, that Glastonbury is Avalon and the burial place of King Arthur and his Queen, Guinevere. There is a thorn tree on the site that, it is claimed, descends from Joseph's staff. And there is a grave that purports to be that of Arthur and Guinevere. The abbey is said to date from 7th century; by 1086, it was allegedly the richest monastery in England and, in the 14th century, only Westminster was wealthier. The community was dissolved on the orders of Henry VIII in 1539 and the last abbot, Richard Whiting, was hanged, drawn and quartered on nearby Glastonbury Tor.
Glastonbury
The legend is that while King David I was hunting in the area he had a vision of a stag with a cross glowing between its antlers. Interpreting this as an act of God, the King declared that an abbey should be built on the same spot, and the Augustinian Abbey of the Holy Rood was accordingly founded in 1128. Holy Rood means ‘Holy Cross’, a fragment of which had allegedly been brought to Scotland by David’s mother, St Margaret, and kept at the Abbey until the 14th century.
Holyrood Abbey is part of the Palace of Holyroodhouse and can only be visited as part of a visit to the Palace.
The Royal Mile,
Edinburgh
Hyde Abbey was founded in 1110 to replace the New Minster at Winchester, which had been supplanted by the new Norman Cathedral. So the Benedictine monks moved their library, relics - and the bodies of King Alfred, his wife Alswitha and son, Edward the Elder to the newly built abbey. The abbey was badly damaged during the Anarchy, but was rebuilt, became a place of pilgrimage and survived until 1539, when it was surrendered to Henry VIII’s commissioners. Most of the buildings were destroyed, its treasures dispersed and the monks pensioned off. In the 18th century, a prison was built on part of the site. That too has gone now and all that remains of the once-great abbey is a an impressive, though pigeon-infested, stone gateway, an arch that used to span the abbey millstream and St Bartholomew’s church opposite, which had been built for the pilgrims and lay-brothers. Most of the site of the abbey is now covered with housing. Just down the road along King Alfred Place is Hyde Abbey Garden, where the site of the high altar and the graves of King Alfred & Co are thought to have been.
Hyde
Winchester
Leicester Abbey was an Augustinian House, founded by the 2nd Earl of Leicester, Robert le Bossu, in 1143. It is famous for being the place where Cardinal Wolsey died on 29 November 1530, on his way south to face the wrath of his king, Henry VIII, and a charge of treason. Wolsey was also buried in the abbey, but his remains have never been found. The abbey was dissolved on Henry VIII’s orders in 1538 and the stones were re-used to construct what became Cavendish House, a mansion acquired by the Earl of Devonshire, William Cavendish, where Charles I lodged before the Battle of Naseby in 1645. Cavendish House was plundered and destroyed by Royalist troops after the battle. Though a massive complex in its heyday, the exact location of the abbey was lost until the 1920s/30s. The lines of its walls are now marked by low stone walls and there is a memorial to Wolsey near what would have been the high altar of the abbey church.
Leicester
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