Netley Abbey - WikiHQ

Netley Abbey is a ruined late medieval monastery in the village of Netley near Southampton in Hampshire, England. The abbey was founded in 1239 as a house for monks of the austere Cistercian order. Despite royal patronage, Netley was never rich, produced no influential scholars nor churchmen, and its nearly 300-year history was quiet. The monks were best known to their neighbours for the generous hospitality they offered to travellers on land and sea.

In 1536, Netley Abbey was seized by Henry VIII of England during the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the buildings granted to William Paulet, a wealthy Tudor politician, who converted them into a mansion. The abbey was used as a country house until the beginning of the eighteenth century, after which it was abandoned and partially demolished for building materials. Subsequently the ruins became a tourist attraction, and provided inspiration to poets and artists of the Romantic movement. In the early twentieth century the site was given to the nation, and it is now a Scheduled Ancient Monument, cared for by English Heritage. The extensive remains consist of the church, cloister buildings, abbot's house, and fragments of the post-Dissolution mansion. Netley Abbey is one of the best preserved medieval Cistercian monasteries in southern England.

Foundation

Netley was conceived by the influential Peter des Roches, who was Bishop of Winchester from 1205 until his death in 1238; the abbey was founded shortly after his death, in 1239. The founder's charter shows the name of the abbey as "the church of St Mary of Edwardstow", or the Latin "Ecclesia Sanctae Mariae de loco Sancti Edwardi" although the title of the charter calls it "Letley"; the present name of Netley is most likely derived from this. The abbey was one of a pair of monasteries which the bishop intended as a memorial to himself; the other is La Clarté-Dieu in Saint-Paterne-Racan, France. Des Roches began to purchase the lands for Netley's initial endowment in about 1236, but he died before the project was finished and the foundation was completed by his executors. According to the Chronicle of Waverley Abbey, the first monks arrived to settle the site on 25 July 1239 from neighbouring Beaulieu Abbey, a year after the bishop's death.

Buildings

Church

The fruits of royal patronage were demonstrated by the construction of a large church ( long), built in the fashionable French-influenced Gothic style pioneered by Henry's masons at Westminster Abbey. The high quality and elaborate nature of the church's decoration, particularly its mouldings and tracery, indicate how the machine of royal patronage lead to a move away from the deliberate austerity of the early Cistercian churches towards the grandeur then considered appropriate to a secular church such as a cathedral. Dating the various parts of the building relies predominantly on stylistic criteria. In the nave, the lay brothers had their own choir stalls and altar for services. The monks of Netley kept up a schedule of services and prayer both day and night following the traditional canonical hours; a staircase in the south transept went up to the monks' dormitory, allowing them to convenient access to the night services. The lay brothers had their own entrance to the church at the west end via a covered gallery from their accommodation. Over time this rule was relaxed to allow pilgrims to visit shrines, as at Hailes Abbey with its relic of the Holy Blood, and to allow the construction of tombs and chantries for patrons and wealthy benefactors of the house, as in the churches of other orders. Excavated sculpture shows that the church at Netley featured a number of elaborate tombs and monuments.

The interior of the church was richly decorated. The walls were plastered and painted in white and maroon with geometric patterns and lines designed to give the impression of ashlar masonry. Architectural detail was also picked out in maroon. The windows of the church were filled with painted glass, six panels of which have been recovered. They show scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary, the Crucifixion, monks, monsters and humorous animals. The monks' desks were placed in the north walk of the cloister, and a cupboard for books in current use was carved into the external wall of the south transept. At Netley this was a magnificent apartment divided into three aisles with vaults springing from four columns; a stone bench ran around the walls for the monks to sit on, and the abbot's throne was in the centre of the east wall. The entrance to the chapter house from the cloister is via an elaborately moulded arched doorway, flanked on each side by a window of similar size. The windows had sills and columns of Purbeck Marble, the whole forming an impressive composition appropriate to the second most important space in the abbey after the church. South of this runs a long vaulted hall with a central row of pillars supporting the roof. This room was much altered over time and probably served several purposes during the lifetime of the abbey. Initially, it may have served as the monks' day room and accommodation for novices, where the monks—initially only the sick, but by the later middle ages the whole convent—could eat meat dishes not normally allowed in the main dining hall.

The monks' dormitory was on the top floor of the east range, a long room with a high pitched roof (the mark of which can still be seen on the transept wall) which ran the length of the building. the dormitory at Netley would, as at other houses, have been divided into sections with wooden dividers to give every monk his own private area, each leading off a central corridor. The treasury, a tiny vaulted room, was at the north end of the dormitory, presumably located for security at night.

Reredorter and infirmary

thumb|Façade of the [[reredorter (communal latrine), with the windows of the Tudor long gallery on the left]]

Another large building lies crosswise at the south end of the east range. Its lower level consists of a vaulted hall equipped with a grand thirteenth-century hooded fireplace and its own garderobe. It is not clear what this chamber was used for, but it may have been the monastic infirmary—if so, it was a most unusual, perhaps unique, arrangement. Normally in a medieval Cistercian monastery an infirmary with its own kitchens, chapel and ancillary buildings would have been located east of the main buildings around a second, smaller cloister, but at Netley these seem to be absent. So far, excavations have not revealed whether Netley had a separate infirmary complex.

To the west of the reredorter block was the buttery, a room where the monks' wine (some of it direct from the king's cellars at Southampton) Going east to west, first came the day stair, then the warming house where the communal fire burned constantly to allow the monks to warm themselves after long hours of study in the unheated cloister.

The refectory projected south from the centre of the range, as was usual in Cistercian monasteries. This is now almost completely demolished save for the north wall, although the foundations survive underground and have been excavated.

West range

thumb|upright=1.5|Plan of the abbey

The west range at Netley is small and does not run the full length of the west side of the cloister. It is divided in two by the original main entrance to the abbey, with an outer parlour where the monks could meet visitors. North of this on the ground floor were cellars for food storage, and to the south was the lay brothers' refectory. The upper floor, reached by a stair from the cloister, was the dormitory for the lay brothers. Netley was a late foundation, built at a time when the lay brothers were a declining part of the Cistercian economy, and it is probable that they were fewer in number, hence the small size of the accommodation needed. By the time the west range was completed in the fourteenth century they were rapidly disappearing, and had all but vanished by the end of the century. At some houses, such as Sawley Abbey in Lancashire, a series of comfortable chambers for the use of monastic officials or guests were built; elsewhere, such as Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire, the west range was turned into a private dwelling of great elegance for the abbot. The ruins of the west range at Netley are too fragmentary to be sure of their purpose in the latter part of the medieval period. There were subsequently few major structural changes during the monastic period aside from the re-vaulting of the south transept of the church at the end of the fifteenth century. It is likely, however, that there were many internal changes to match the rising standards of living during the later Middle Ages (as seen at Cleeve Abbey in Somerset) that have left no evidence on the surviving remains.

Precinct

thumb|right|The abbot's house with the church and cloister to the left

A stone building to the east of the main complex is thought to have been the abbot's house. It contains two levels of vaulted apartments consisting of two halls, bedchambers, a private chapel and service rooms. The upper level was reached by an external staircase, which allowed this floor to be used independently if needed.

The central core of the monastery was surrounded by a precinct containing an outer (public) courtyard and an inner (private) courtyard, gardens, barns, guesthouses for travellers, stables, fishponds, the home farm and industrial buildings. The site was defended by a high bank and moat, part of which remains east of the abbey. Entrance was strictly controlled by an outer and inner gatehouse. A chapel, known as the (Latin for chapel outside the gates) was placed by the outer gatehouse for the use of travellers and the local population. Of the precinct buildings, only the abbot's house, the moat and the fishponds have left visible remains.

Netley's fresh water was supplied by two aqueducts which ran for several miles east and west of the abbey, up into the areas of modern Southampton and Eastleigh. The remains of the eastern aqueduct, now known as Tickleford Gully, can be seen in Wentworth Gardens, Southampton.

Monastic history

Henry III added to the endowment left by Peter des Roches, donating farmland, urban property in Southampton and elsewhere, and spiritual revenues from churches. By 1291, taxation returns show that the abbey had a clear annual revenue of £81, a comfortable income. However, shortly afterwards a period of bad management resulted in the abbey accruing substantial debts, and it was soon almost bankrupt. In 1328 the government was forced to appoint an administrator, John of Mere, to address the crisis. Despite forcing the abbot to apply revenues to debt repayment and to sell many of the estates, the operation was only partly successful. Ten years later the abbey was again appealing to the king for help with a disastrous financial situation. The monks blamed their problems on the cost of providing hospitality to the many travellers by sea, and the king's sailors who landed at the abbey. The king provided some small grants enabling the abbey to overcome its difficulties but the property sales meant that the abbey's income never recovered and it settled into what has been described as genteel poverty. led by its monks. The volume itself is a Latin manuscript executed in the 13th century, a copy of Roger of Hoveden's Chronica ("Chronicles"). Roger (died c. 1201) was an English historian of the reigns of Henry II and Richard I particularly important for his account of the years 1148–1170. Little is known in detail about his life, but he may have been a priest and was a courtier to Henry II, and accompanied Richard I to the Holy Land on the Third Crusade and served as a local justice in the north of England, and more generally as a negotiator between the crown and various barons and monastic houses.

Dissolution

In 1535 the abbey's income was assessed in the Valor Ecclesiasticus, Henry VIII's general survey of Church finances prior to the plunder, at £160 gross, £100 net, which meant the following year that it came under the terms of the First Suppression Act, Henry's initial move in the Dissolution of the Monasteries. At the beginning of the following year, the King's commissioners, Sir James Worsley, John Paulet, George Paulet and William Berners, delivered a report to the government on the monasteries of Hampshire which provides a snapshot of Netley on the eve of the Dissolution. The commissioners noted that Netley was inhabited by seven monks, all of them priests, and the abbey was: