BEAULIEU AND CHRISTCHURCH
While I was in Southampton, I made up my mind to visit a place which I
had all my life desired to see, but which I had never yet set eyes
upon, I mean Beaulieu Abbey in the New Forest. To this end I set out
early one morning, by steamboat, across Southampton Water, and landed
at Hythe, whence I had only to cross the eastern part of Beaulieu
Heath, a walk of some five miles, to find myself where I would be.
The day was fair, the tide at the flood; in the woods, across the
water, I could see where Netley Abbey, another Cistercian house,
younger than Beaulieu, once lifted up its voice in ceaseless praise of
God, the Maker of all that beauty in which it stood, scarcely spoiled
even now by the amazing energy of the modern world. It was then with a
light heart that I set out by a byway under Furze Down, and so across
the open heath, coming down at last through the woods to the ruins of
the abbey and the river of Beaulieu.
There can be no more delicious spot in the world. St Bernard loved the
valleys as St Benedict the hills, and as St Bernard was the refounder
of the Cistercian Order to which Beaulieu belonged, it, like Waverley,
Tintern, Netley, and a hundred others in England, was set in one of
those delicious vales in which I think England is richer than any other
country, and which here, in England of my heart, seem to demand rather
our worship than our praise.
Beaulieu Abbey had always interested me. In the first place it was one
of the greatest, though not the earliest, houses in England of the
Cistercian Order, that reform of the Benedictines begun as William of
Malmesbury bears witness by an Englishman, Stephen Harding, sometime a
monk of Sherborne. And then it was the only religious house within the
confines of the New Forest. It seems that in the year 1204, just a year
after he had given the manor of Faringdon in Berkshire to St Mary of
Citeaux, and established there a small house of Cistercian monks, King
John founded this great monastery of St Mary of Beaulieu for the same
Order, making provision for not less than thirty brethren, and giving
it Faringdon for a cell. John endowed the house with some six manors
and several churches, gave it a golden chalice, and many cattle, as
well as corn and wine and money, and besought the aid of the abbots of
the Order on behalf of the new house. To such good purpose, indeed, did
he support Beaulieu, that Hugh, the first abbot, was alone his friend,
when Innocent III., in the spring of 1208 placed England under an
interdict. This Hugh went as the King's ambassador to Rome, and having
received promises of submission from the King, who awaited his return
in the mother house of the Order in England, at Waverley,
was successful in reconciling him with the Pope. In return
the King gave him a palfrey among other presents, and the
interdict being lifted, contributed nine hundred marks towards
the building of Beaulieu, to be followed by other even more generous
offerings. Nor was Henry III. neglectful of the place, so that in 1227
upon the vigil of the Assumption, the monks were able to use their
church, though it was not till nineteen years later that the monastery
was completed, and dedicated in the presence of the King and Queen,
Prince Edward and a vast concourse of bishops, nobles, and common
folk, by the Bishop of Winchester. Upon that occasion, Prince Edward
was seized with illness, and, strange as it may seem, we are told that
the Queen remained in the abbey, to nurse him, for three weeks. But the
house was always under the royal protection. Edward I. constantly
stayed there, and the abbots were continually employed upon diplomatic
business. From 1260 to 1341, when he asked to be freed from the duty,
the abbot of Beaulieu sat in Parliament, and in 1368 Edward III.
granted the monks a weekly market within the precincts. One other
privilege, unique in southern England, Beaulieu had, the right to
perpetual sanctuary granted by Innocent III., and this seems to have
been used to the full in the Wars of the Roses, at least we find
Richard III. inquiring into the matter in 1463. There it seems Perkin
Warbeck had found safety, as had Lady Warwick after Barnet, and at the
time of the Suppression there were thirty men in sanctuary in the
"Great Close of Beaulieu," which seems to have included all the
original grant of land made to the abbey by King John. Beaulieu
evidently very greatly increased in honour, for in 1509 its abbot was
made Bishop of Bangor but continued to hold the abbey, and when he died
the abbot of Waverley, the oldest house of the Order in England,
succeeded him, the post being greatly sought after. The Act of 1526
suppressing the lesser monasteries, in which so many Cistercian houses
perished, did not touch Beaulieu, but Netley fell early in the
following year, and the monks were sent to Beaulieu. Many then looked
for the spoil of the great abbey, among them Lord Lisle who besought
Thomas Cromwell for it, but he was denied. Indeed there seems to have
been no idea of suppressing the house at that time. But the Abbot
Stevens was a traitor. In 1538 he eagerly signed the surrender demanded
by the infamous Layton and Petre, and the site was granted to Thomas
Wriothesley, afterwards Earl of Southampton, from whose family it came
in the time of William III. to Lord Montagu, and so to the Dukes of
Buccleuch, who still hold it.
Nothing can exceed the beauty of the remains of the house there by the
river, in perhaps the loveliest corner of southern England. The great
abbey church has gone, destroyed at the Suppression, but not a little
of the monastery remains. The great Gate House called the abbot's
lodging and now the Palace House, the seat of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu,
a fine Decorated building with a beautiful entrance hall, may sometimes
be seen. From this one passes across the grass to the old Refectory,
now fitted up as the parish church, a noble work of the Early English
style of the thirteenth century, as is the fine pulpit with its arcade
in the thickness of the wall. Here of old the monk read aloud while his
brethren took their meagre repast.
From the Refectory one comes into the ruined cloisters, lovely with all
manner of flowers, and so to the site of the old Chapter House, of the
sacristy and the monastic buildings. All that remains is in the early
Decorated style of the end of the thirteenth century. Here, too, upon
the north stood the great abbey church, three hundred and thirty-five
feet long, a cruciform building consisting of nave with two aisles,
central tower, transepts with aisles, chancel with circular apse and
chapels, now marked out in chalk upon the grass. All about are the
woods, meadows, fishponds and greens of the monks who are gone.
I do not know how this strikes another who shall see it to-day, in all
its useless beauty, in the midst of our restless and unhappy England;
but what I felt has already been expressed and by so good an Englishman
as William Cobbett.
"Now ... I daresay," he writes, "that you are a very good Protestant;
and I am a monstrous good Protestant too. We cannot bear the Pope, nor
"they there priests that makes men confess there sins and go down upon
their marrow-bones before them." But let us give the devil his due; and
let us not act worse by these Roman Catholics (who by the by were our
forefathers) than we are willing to act by the devil himself. Now then
here were a set of monks. None of them could marry, of course none of
them could have wives and families. They could possess no private
property; they could bequeath nothing; they could own nothing but that
which they owned in common with the rest of their body. They could
hoard no money; they could save nothing. Whatever they received as rent
for their lands, they must necessarily spend upon the spot, for they
never could quit that spot. They did spend it all upon the spot; they
kept all the poor. Beaulieu and all round about Beaulieu saw no misery,
and had never heard the damned name of pauper pronounced as long as
those Monks continued.
"You and I are excellent Protestants; you and I have often assisted on
the 5th of November to burn Guy Fawkes, the Pope and the Devil. But you
and I would much rather be life holders under Monks than
rackrenters...."
St Thomas Aquinas has told us that there were three things for a sight
of which he would have endured a year in Purgatory, not unwillingly:
Christ in the flesh, Rome in her flower, and an Apostle disputing.
Christ in the flesh, I would indeed I might have seen, and Rome in her
flower were worth even such a price, but for me an Apostle disputing
would, let me confess it, have little attraction. Instead I would that
I might see England before the fall, England of the thirteenth,
fourteenth or fifteenth century, England of my heart, with all her
great cathedrals still alive, with all her great monasteries still in
being, those more than six hundred houses destroyed by Henry, and not
least this house of the Cistercians in Beaulieu. And if I might see
that, I should have seen one of the fairest things and the noblest that
ever were in the world.
From Beaulieu I set out in the afternoon across the Forest, and at
first over the western part of Beaulieu Heath for Brockenhurst. The
road across the heath is not in itself of much beauty, but it affords
some glorious views both of the Forest and the sea. As I drew nearer to
Brockenhurst, however, I came into the woods, and the sylvan beauty of
the vale, through which the Lymington River flows southward, was
delicious. Brockenhurst itself is charmingly embowered and is
surrounded by some of the loveliest of the woodlands. The church stands
high, perhaps as a guide, over a woodland churchyard, and is the
evident successor of a Norman building, as its south doorway and font
of Purbeck bear witness and the chancel arch too, unless indeed this be
earlier still. The chancel, however, dates from the fourteenth
century, a good example in its littleness of the Decorated style, but
it is half spoiled by the enormous pew which blocks the entrance. The
tower and spire and a good part of the nave are completely modern. The
great yew in the churchyard must date at least from Edward I.'s time,
and perhaps may have seen the day on which Red William fell.
From Brockenhurst, on the following morning, I set out again over the
open heath for Boldre southward. Many a fine view over the woods I had,
and once, as I came down Sandy Down, I caught sight of the Isle of
Wight. Then the scene changed, and I came through meadows, and past
coppices into Boldre. In the midst of a wood, as it were, I suddenly
found the church, and this interested me more than I can well say, for
here again I found what at one time must have been a complete Norman
building. Surely if the history-books are right this is an astonishing
thing; but then, as I have long since learned, the history one is
taught at school is a mere falsehood from start to finish. There is
probably no schoolboy in England who has not read of the awful cruelty
and devastation that went with the formation of the New Forest, by the
Conqueror in 1079. It is generally spoken of as only less appalling
than the burning of Northumberland. It is said that more than fifty-two
parish churches within the new bounds of the New Forest were destroyed,
and a fertile district of a hundred square miles laid waste and
depopulated to provide William with a hunting-ground. Now if this be
true how does it come that upon my first day in the Forest I find a
Norman church at Brockenhurst with something very like a Saxon chancel
arch, and that upon my second day I walk right into another church in
part Norman too? This is surely an astonishing thing. It is also, I
find, a fact that much of the New Forest had been a royal hunting-
ground in the Saxon times, and that the afforestation of William is not
so much as mentioned in the Saxon Chronicle. The whole story of the
devastation of this great country would seem to rest upon the writings
of William of Jumièges or Ordericus Vitalis, neither of whom was alive
at the time of the afforestation. This must have been known surely to
our modern historians; but so is the history of England written. Our
real grievance against William was not his afforestation, but his cruel
Forest Law, which demanded the limb of a man for the life of a beast, a
thing I think unknown in England before his advent. It was this harsh
law, so bitterly resented, which at last, as we may think, cost William
Rufus his life. But the old tale remains, and therefore I was greatly
astonished in Boldre Church.
Doubtless the original Norman church consisted of a nave, chancel and
north and south aisles. The south aisle remains, as does the arcade
which separates it from the nave. In the Early English time the north
aisle was rebuilt or added, perhaps, for the first time, and the
chancel rebuilt. Later the church was lengthened westward, and the
tower built at the eastern end of the Norman aisle. In that aisle there
is a tablet to William Gilpin, the author of "Forest Scenery," who was
vicar of Boldre for a generation, dying in 1804 aged eighty years. He
is buried in the churchyard.
Boldre is certainly a place to linger in, a place that one is sorry to
leave, but I could not stay, being intent on Lymington. Therefore I
went down through the oak woods, over Boldre Bridge, to find the high
road, which presently brought me past St Austin's once belonging to
the Priory of Christchurch, under Buckland Rings to the very ancient
borough of Lymington, with its charming old ivy-clad church tower at
the end of the High Street. The church, in so far as it is old of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, has little to boast of, for it has
been quite horribly restored. In the long street of Lymington I slept.
There seemed to be nothing to keep me in Lymington, and therefore,
early upon the following morning, I set out for Milford, five miles
away by the sea, and there I wonderfully saw the Needles and the great
Island and found another Norman church, Norman that is to say in its
foundations. All Saints, Milford, consists to-day of chancel with north
and south chapels west of it, transepts, nave with north and south
aisles, and a western chapel on either side the western tower, and a
south porch. It is a most beautiful and interesting building. Doubtless
there originally stood here a twelfth-century Norman church, consisting
of nave with aisles and chancel, of which two arches remain in the
south arcade of the nave. Then in the thirteenth century the church was
rebuilt, as we see it, and very beautiful it is, in its Early English
dress, passing into Decorated, in the chancel and transepts.
From Milford, through a whole spring day, I went on by the coast as far
I could, westward to Christchurch. All the way, the sea, the sky, and
the view of the island and of Christchurch bay closed by Hengistbury
Head in the west, and the long bar on which Hurst Castle stands in the
east were worth a king's ransom. They say all this coast has strong
attractions for the geologist; but what of the poet and painter? Surely
here, when the wind comes over the sea and the Island, showing his
teeth, to possess the leaning coast, one may see and understand why
England is the England of my heart. At least I thought so, and lingered
there so long that twilight had fallen before I found myself under the
darkness of the great Priory of Christchurch, the goal of my desire.
It was not without due cause and reason that I wished to see, instead
of an Apostle disputing, England before the fall. Indeed I am sure that
I should not have been unwise to exchange "Rome in her flower" for such
a sight as that; Christchurch proves it.
We march up and down England and count up our treasures, of which this
Priory of Christchurch is not the least; but we never pause perhaps to
remember what, through the damnable act of Thomas Cromwell and Henry
Tudor, we have lost. What we have lost! hundreds of churches, hundreds
of monasteries as fine as Christchurch, and hundreds far more solemn
and reverent. Reading, which now gives a title to an Isaacs, (God save
us all!) was, before the fall, just a great monastery, a Norman pile as
grand as Durham or Ely. What of Glastonbury and Amesbury, older far,
and of those many hundred others which stood up strong before God for
our souls--without avail? They are gone; Christchurch in some sort
remains.
Christchurch stands in the angle where the rivers Avon and Stour meet,
and it is thus secured upon the north, east, and south; its great and
perhaps its only attraction is the great Priory church in whose name
that of the town, Twyneham, has long been lost; but there are beside a
ruined Norman house, and a pretty mediaeval bridge over the Avon, from
which a most noble view of the great church may be had. This, which
dates in its foundation from long before the Conquest, is to-day a
great cruciform building consisting roughly of Norman nave and
transepts, the nave buttressed on the north in the thirteenth century,
fifteenth-century chancel and western tower, and thirteenth-century
north porch--altogether one of the most glorious churches left to us
in England.
Its history, as I say, goes back far beyond the Conquest, when it was
served by secular canons, as it was at the time of the Domesday Survey,
when we find that twenty-four were in residence. But in the time of
William Rufus, Ranulph Flambard, the Bishop of Durham, his chief
minister, obtained a grant of the church and town of Christchurch, and
soon had suppressed all the canonries save five, and would have
suppressed them all but for the timely death of the Red King, which
involved the fall and imprisonment of his rascal minister. After an
interval, in which the church was governed by Gilbert de Dousgunels,
who set out for Rome to get the Pope's leave to refound the house, but
died upon the journey, Henry I. gave manor, town and church to his cousin,
Richard de Redvers, who proved a great benefactor to the Priory, and
established a Dean over the canons, one Peter, who was succeeded by
Dean Ralph. Then in 1150 came Dean Hilary, who as Bishop of Chichester,
petitioned Richard de Redvers to establish Christchurch as a Priory of
Canons Regular of St Austin. This was done; a certain Reginald was
appointed first prior, and he ruled Christchurch for thirty-six years
till, in 1186, he was succeeded by Ralph. It was not, however, till the
time of the third Prior that the high altar of the new church begun by
Gilbert and continued by Richard de Redvers and his priors was
dedicated upon the feast of St Thomas of Canterbury, 1195. This would
seem to prove that the Norman choir was not finished until then;
similar consecration of other altars would lead us to believe that
perhaps the vault and the clerestory of the nave were completed in
1234. At the same time the beautiful north porch was built and the
north aisle was buttressed. To the fourteenth century we owe the fine
rood screen restored in 1848, but the next great period of building was
the fifteenth century, when the Lady Chapel, with the chapels north and
south of it, were built, and later in the same century the great choir
was entirely re-erected.
Thus Christchurch Priory grew until the Reformation. It escaped the
first raid of Cromwell in 1536, but in spite of the petition of John
Draper, the last Prior, in 1539 the house was demanded of him and he
surrendered it. The report of the vandals and sacrilegious persons who
received it is worth copying, if only to show their character. "We
found," they wrote, "the Prior a very honest, conformable person, and
the house well furnished with jewels and plate, whereof some be meet
for the king's majesty in use as a little chalice of gold, a goodly
large cross, double gilt with the foot garnished, and with stone and
pearl; two goodly basons double gilt. And there be other things of
silver.... In thy church we find a chapel and monument curiously made
of Caen stone, prepared by the late mother of Reginald Pole for her
burial, which we have caused to be defaced, and all the arms and badges
to be delete." It is consoling to note that one of the rascals that
signed that report, Dr London, was shortly afterwards exposed in his
true colours and openly put to penance for adultery before he died in
prison, where he lay for perjury.
The report stated that the church was superfluous. It was the only true
word written there. When a religion is destroyed, its temples are
certainly superfluous. However, there was a considerable influence
brought to bear by the people of the neighbourhood, and the church
itself was granted them for their use. The Priory, which stood to the
south of the church, was, of course, destroyed.
One might stand a whole month in that glorious building with this only
regret, that it is in the hands of strangers. The use to which it is
put is not that for which it was intended, and half the delight of the
place is thus lost to us. But no one can pass down that great avenue of
elms to the glorious north porch, a master-work of the thirteenth
century, without rejoicing that when all is said the church was saved
to us. The great Norman nave, with its thirteenth-century clerestory,
and alas, modern stucco vaulting, the Norman aisles and north transept,
are too reverent for destruction, the fifteenth-century choir and
eastern chapels too lovely.
A certain amount of the old furniture remains to the church in the
restored screen of the fourteenth century, and the reredos over the
communion table and another in the Lady Chapel; here, too, is the old
altar stone of Purbeck. The chantry of the poor Countess of Salisbury,
who was beheaded for high treason in 1541, so brutally defaced by Dr
London and his infamous colleagues, stands there too upon the north;
and close by in the north chapel is the tomb with fine alabaster
effigies of Sir John and Lady Chydroke (d. 1455), removed from the
nave, and in the Lady Chapel lie its founders, Sir Thomas and Lady
West. Of the modern restorations and additions I have nothing to say,
and more especially of the monument to Shelley; a parody of a Pietà
merely blasphemous, beneath the tower.
Now when I had seen all this, to say nothing of the old school-room
over the Lady Chapel and the Norman house and castle mound of the De
Redvers, somewhat sorrowful for many things, I began to think again of
the Forest, and immediately set out where the road led to Lyndhurst,
and this just before midday.