The Changing English Countryside, 1400-1700 by Leonard Cantor

Author:Leonard Cantor [Cantor, Leonard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Great Britain, Modern, 17th Century, 18th Century, 16th Century, Social History
ISBN: 9781351730204
Google: ckgrDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-07-06T01:30:22+00:00

Plate 24 Abbot Huby’s tower at Fountains Abbey, near Ripon in Yorkshire. About 160 feet high, it was built in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries

By 1539, the King was making it clear that all the monastic buildings were to be destroyed and, as a result, once a monastery was surrendered, the lead was to be stripped off the roof and the walls were to be razed to the ground. However, the total demolition of churches and conventual buildings of this sort was neither cheap nor easy and the degree of ruination varied from house to house. Overall, it has been calculted that of all the monasteries suppressed in England, about one-third have left no trace at all, and that of the remainder rather less than one-third are represented by substantial remains of buildings.19 In any case, destruction continued over a long period, as throughout the second half of the sixteenth century, local builders used deserted monasteries as easily worked quarries for stone. In some parts of the country where there was little building stone available, as in East Anglia, sites were more intensively plundered. In other sites like the remote Yorkshire dales where the great Cistercian abbeys were located, less stone was removed and more substantial ruins remain. However, the demand for lead from roofs was great everywhere. Fortunately, some of the monastic buildings were preserved and put to other uses after 1540. As we have seen, some were purchased by lay owners and converted into private dwellings; former abbot’s houses and gatehouses seemed to have been highly regarded for conversion into desirable country residences, as at Beaulieu and Titchfield in Hampshire, and Woburn in Bedfordshire. At nearly a hundred places, monastic churches continued to be used as places of worship, many of them being converted into parish churches, as in Cartmel in Lancashire, Dorchester-on-Thames in Oxfordshire and Christchurch in Hampshire. The manorial agricultural buildings of ecclesiastical estates, such as home farms and tithe barns, were also often left intact.

The variation and quality of the ruins that remain today can be illustrated from the Thames valley, in Oxfordshire, a favourite location for monastic foundations.20 They range from the once-great Benedictine abbey at Eynsham, where only some doorways and a piece of arcade remain; through the Augustinian abbey at Dorchester, where the magnificent monastic church is still in use as the parish church; to the large abbey of Osney, originally just outside the city walls at Oxford and now in the city, where the only depressing remains are a small oblong fifteenth-century building with one window.

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