Abbey House

“ The Abbey was one of those capacious, irregular buildings in which all that a house was in the past and all that it is in the present are composed into a harmonious whole, and in which past and present are so cunningly interwoven that it would have been difficult for any one but an architect to distinguish where the improvements and additions of yesterday were grafted on to the masonry of the fourteenth century. ”

“ The Abbey church lies, like the kernel, in the centre; the streets radiate upwards in every direction, and in the bottom of the valley the Avon winds like a silver riband. I continued my way along a pretty walk to Prior Park, a large and formerly splendid mansion, built by a haughty Lord, but now possessed by a meek Quaker, who lets the house stand empty, and, true to the simplicity of his faith, lives in the stable. ”

“ The house itself, though preserving the name and the traditions of the Abbey, had been converted during Tudor times from religious to lay uses. Very little of the old monks' building remained intact, though evidences of it cropped up in unexpected quarters. There were the remains of a piscina in the pantry; [24] a groined arch roofed the back kitchen; two carved stone pillars supported the fire-place in the dining-room; a Gothic doorway led into the courtyard, and the remnants of some ancient choir stalls were fitted as a window-seat on the stairs. ”

“ Floors and ceilings were relaid; the roof was made watertight again, and the dust of half a century was scoured out. He showed me some photographs of the place. It was called an Abbey, though as a matter of fact it had been only the infirmary of the long-vanished Abbey of Closter some five miles away. The larger part of this building remained as it had been in pre-Reformation days, but a wing had been added in Jacobean times, and that part of the house had been kept in something like repair by Mr. Clarke. ”

“ In "the walle to the streete" we may perhaps discern an explanation of the continuation of the angular wall on the south, which runs on for a distance not yet ascertained in the direction of the upper part of the town, and would have passed near the building which formerly occupied the site of the present Abbey House.
"Use your talents. Wee guide. It is meet. Noe worke, noe wage. All workes well. This wee tell you. Ledde was on the roofe—ne stones, the wych cometh from meaner buildings elsewhere. The stone tiles were high roofes but ye chappell was flatte or thereabouts. ”

“ The open space (Romeland) , with its quaint high-gabled, stuccoed, and red-brick houses, is a busy scene on Tuesdays, when the cattle market is held here. On the eastern side, abutting upon the Abbey church, the tower of which comes charmingly into view over the house tops, is the ancient corn mill, which was given to the Abbey by Maud, Queen of Henry I., in 1108, in exchange for the site of Holy Trinity, Aldgate. She also restored to the Abbey certain lands, which had been alienated, known as the Abbey fields, which stretch northward from here ”

“ Freda was trembling with triumph, but also with some apprehension. The Abbey was the only place to which she could take the wounded man, and yet she could not but fear that it might prove a very unsafe refuge. The little grinning man, whom they had left behind on the edge of the cliff, was a trusted person in her father’s mysterious house, and could go and come by secret ways, whenever he pleased. ”

“ Another part of the site is called the Abbey House. Royal residence. Catherine, the Queen of Henry V., and Elizabeth, Queen of Edward IV. retired to this place, where they died, the former in 1436; the latter soon after the forfeiture of her lands, by an order of the Council, in 1486. The church was erected in 1680, of brick, with a low square tower and turret, and consists of a chancel, nave, two aisles, and a transept. A free school was founded here by Mr. ”

“ Sir Thomas Wyatt, the poet, Bishop Asser, tutor to Alfred the Great, more than one of the Saxon kings, and Abbot Clement (1163) (of whose tomb but a fragment remains in the north choir aisle) are interred in the cathedral church. The cloisters were on the north side of the church—the former dormitory is now used as a schoolroom. A portion of the refectory still remains, also the abbey barn and the abbey house—the latter being rebuilt after the Dissolution. ”

“ Bective Abbey.​—​The Abbey of Bective, in the immediate neighbourhood of Trim, was a Cistercian house, founded by Murchard O’Melaghlin, Prince of Meath, in A.D. 1146. The ruins exhibit, in a remarkable degree, a union of ecclesiastical with military and domestic architecture. Their chief feature is a strong battlemented tower, the lower apartment of which is vaulted, placed at the south corner of the quadrangular space occupied by the various buildings, and in the centre of which the cloisters remain in good preservation. ”

“ And every person had everything good-cheap, except the poor monks, friars, and nuns, that had no money to bestow of anything, as it appeared by the suppression of an abbey hard by me, called the Roche Abbey, a house of white monks, a very fair-builded house, all of freestone, and every house vaulted with freestone, and covered with lead (as the abbeys was in England, as well as the churches be) . ”

“ They changed the Chapter House for the no less beautiful church of St. Stephen in 1547, not long after the Dissolution of the Religious Houses. But the History of the Houses of Parliament belongs to the History of the Country.
We have now gone through the Abbey without attempting any description of it. That has been done over and over again; now well, now ill. It is a treasury{172} of architectural interest; it is crammed full of historical associations; one may linger among its ruins, among its monuments, under its noble roof, book in hand for days and weeks and years. ”

“ Mercer; "more like a farm road except for the lodge. Is Grays as big a house as the Abbey?"
"Bigger, I should say," said her husband. "The Pembertons are a very old Meadshire family. I looked them up in a book in the library at the Abbey. Except the Clintons, over the other side, they are the oldest. They have often married into titled families. They are a good deal better than the Graftons, I should say. Sir James Grafton is only the third baronet, and his grandfather was a jeweller in Nottingham, the book says. Of course, they've made money, which stands for everything in these days. ”

“ Mr. W———, our landlord, has lent us a splendid work with engravings, illustrating the antiquities of Furness Abbey. I gather from it that the hotel must have been rebuilt or repaired from an old manor-house, which was itself erected by a family of Prestons, after the Reformation, and was a renewal from the Abbot's residence. Much of the edifice probably, as it exists now, may have been part of the original one; and there are bas-reliefs of Scripture subjects, sculptured in stone, and fixed in the wall of the dining-room, which have been there since the Abbot's time. ”

“ The Abbey was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and belonged to a community of Cistercian monks, an order founded in France in the year 1098. The remains of the Abbey Church are the most entire and picturesque part; but adjoining the southern side are the remains of the Abbot’s lodgings, consisting of the chapter house and dormitories above. ”

“ They live, too, in a very different way, and in widely distinct circles: at the Abbey you meet many an ex-civic notoriety, and many a rising hope of Lombard Street: it is a perpetual succession of dinners, dances, and picnics: at the House you are sure to be introduced to some sober-faced, top-booted, elderly gentleman or other, and to one or two rotund black-skirted individuals ”

“ The chapter house (Fig. 1055) is the only portion of the abbey in good preservation. It consists of an apartment about 24 feet square, with a central pillar, from which spring the ribs of the groined vaulting. At the side walls the ribs rest on corbels. The apartment is lighted with two traceried windows (Fig. 1056) , the tracery of which has been renewed within recent years, after the pattern of the old tracery. The door enters from the cloister on the west. It is of semicircular form (Fig. 1057) , and exhibits in its capitals some peculiar and striking sculpture. ”

“ Annual revenue, £132, 7s. 7d.—1544, Granted to Sir Richard Williams—1650, The abbey house comes into the possession of the Hobby family.
NEATH, a flourishing seaport in Glamorganshire, possesses some interesting features. Claiming to be built on the site of a Roman station and having some scattered remains of an ancient castle—burnt down in the 13th century—it also boasts extensive ruins of an abbey, which, if we believe Lewis Morganwg, the famous Welsh bard, must have been enriched in days past with many beauties—
“Like the sky of the vale of Ebron is the covering of this monastery ”

“ The Abbey and its monastic environs being haunted ground, it was natural that a mysterious visitant of the kind, and one supposed to be under the influence of mental hallucination, should inspire awe in a person unaccustomed to the place. As Colonel Wildman's sister was one day walking along abroad terrace of the garden, she suddenly beheld the Little White Lady coming toward her, and, in the surprise and agitation of the moment, turned and ran into the house. ”

“ The Bishop, Thirleby, was ordered to make the abbot's house his palace; Abbot Benson, now Dean, took up his residence in humble quarters, and all the old glory of the monastery departed for ever, while Henry was quite £60,000 a year richer in our money. Those of the monks for whom no place could be found under the new system were pensioned off, and many of the buildings, such as the refectory and the smaller dormitory, no longer needed for the cowled figures who for so many generations had used them, were pulled down or put to fresh uses. ”

“ Only the gateway of this once magnificent abbey remains, and near it the well dedicated to St Augustine. The gateway—a large embattled structure—is in a good state of preservation, and even yet possesses some of its former dignity. When excavating on the site of the abbey church, a stone effigy of peculiar interest was found. It is 15th century work, representing a lady, of royal birth possibly, who once held the position of abbess in this monastic house. She carries a staff in her right hand and in her left she holds a book. ”

“ Overhead the great rafters are piled, supporting the outer roof; and as we advance a whirr and a rush of wings startle our nerves which are perhaps a little on edge by this time. There is nothing to alarm us however, for it is we who have startled some of the flock of pigeons who live up in the roofs of the Abbey. Hundreds of them congregate here, and get their living down in the great restless city below, especially in Palace Yard. The cabmen on the cabstand there, waiting for the members to come out of the House of Parliament, are greatly attached to the Abbey pigeons. ”

“ All that can be seen now in the green fields, with cows quietly grazing by the river sides, is a sheltered tower of grey stone, the sole remains of what was once a large ecclesiastical house. In 1864, great and important excavations were made, disclosing the foundations of the chancel, nave, transept and chapter-house, showing them to have been of a very considerable size. A few feet from the only remaining part of the abbey is the tomb of James III. and his queen, the Princess Margaret of Denmark. ”

“ So closely are the ruins surrounded by houses that there is some difficulty in defining the original site of the abbey. The approach to the ruins is through a gateway of Perpendicular work, built probably about the end of the 14th century. The parapet is battlemented, and over the centre arch may be seen a canopied niche containing the figure of the Blessed Virgin, the patronal saint of the abbey. A few yards further on after turning slightly to the right one reaches the rest of the monastical remains, which consist only of the guest house, with its adjoining abbot’s or prior’s house. ”

“ Of the abbey church only one end remains; and the old kitchen, with a long range of apartments, is reduced to a heap of rubbish. Leading from the abbey to the modern part of the habitation is a noble room seventy feet in length, and twenty-three in breadth; but every part of the house displays neglect and decay, save those which the present Lord has lately fitted up. ”

“ As time went on, and further room for books became necessary, it was provided, at least in some Cistercian Houses, by cutting off two rectangular spaces from the west end of the Chapter-House. There is a good example of this treatment to be seen at Furness Abbey, built 1150—1200. The following description is borrowed from Mr W. H. St John Hope's architectural history of the buildings. [88]
From the transept southwards the whole of the existing work is of later date, and distinctly advanced character. ”

“ He left bequests of his works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and to the National Gallery in London. In 1912, the Old Masters' Exhibition of the Royal Academy, held at Burlington House, London, included over 300 works of Abbey's loaned for this special occasion as a memorial to him. ”

“ After being used as a malt house for several years the buildings have been restored by the Abingdon Corporation, by whom the room over the gateway is used as council chamber. To the left on passing through the gateway is the site of the former magnificent abbey church, enclosed in the private grounds of the Bishop of Reading. The whole of the foundations are unfortunately covered by greensward; but it is still possible to gain some idea of the immense size and bold outline of the structure. William of Worcester gives the following dimensions—
Nave, 180 feet. ”