[Illustration: BURNHAM ABBEY, From a Sketch, by a Correspondent.]
Burnham is a village of some consideration, in Buckinghamshire, and
gives name to a deanery and hundred. Its prosperity has been also
augmented by the privilege of holding three fairs annually. It is
situate in the picturesque vicinity of Windsor, about five miles from
that town, and three miles N.E. of Maidenhead. It was anciently a place
of much importance. One of the few relics of its greatness is the
ivy-mantled ruin represented in the above Engraving. So late as the
fourteenth century, Burnham could also boast of a royal palace within
its boundary: but, alas! the wand of Prospero has long since touched its
gorgeousness, so as to “leave not a rack behind.”
The ruin stands about one mile south of the village, and is part of an
Augustine nunnery, built in the year 1228, by Richard, Earl of Cornwall,
and brother of Henry the Third. He was a vexatious thorn in the crown of
Henry, whose long and confused reign, “were it not that for the first
time it exhibits the elements of the English constitution in a state of
disorderly fermentation, would scarcely deserve the consideration of the
philosopher and the politician.”[1] One of Richard’s fraternal acts was
placing himself at the head of a formidable confederacy, to which Henry
was obliged to yield. The papal power was at this time at its greatest
height; Richard had been elected King of the Romans, and from the spoil
obtained by the monstrous exactions of his court, he may be presumed to
have erected the above nunnery. Of this system of pious plunder we have
many proud architectural memorials; though to rob with one hand, and
found religious houses with the other, reminds one of the trade of a
waterman--to look one way and row the other.
[1] Sir James Mackintosh.
The nunnery was richly endowed with several of the neighbouring manors;
the remains are now used as the out-offices of an adjoining farm. Little
can be traced of the “studious cloister,” the “storied window,” or the
“high embowed roof;” but the ivy climbs with parasitic fondness over its
gable, or thrusts its rootlets as holdfasts into its crumbling wall. The
dates of these ruins claim the attention of the speculative antiquary.
The chimney, though of great age, did not of course belong to the
original building; the earliest introduction of chimneys into this
country being stated, (but without proof,) to be in the year 1300. The
upper window, and the arched doorway are in the early English style
prevalent at the date of the foundation; the former has the elegant
lancet-shape of the earliest specimens.
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