Relics of Ruin

On Thursday I was in Cirencester, an ancient market town of the western Cotswolds, once the second largest city of Roman Britain. The Perpendicular Gothic tower of St John the Baptist, financed from the wool trade, still dominates the scene, though today the mediæval streets and courts offer wholefood cafés and an inexhaustible variety of shops selling posy home furnishings and fabrics. For everything else, there’s Tesco’s.

At the Corinium Museum, recently redeveloped with lottery money, Tim Porter was giving a talk on the theme of ‘Recycling the Monasteries’. For nearly ten centuries they had laid claim to the best of everything. In five years they were all gone. So what happened to all that material wealth? It is a fascinating question, the answer tracked down by meticulous detective work and well presented with slides of re-used choir stalls, pieces of vestments, bits of stained glass, floor tiles and stone. Lots of stone.

Lowland monasteries with easy access to rivers have largely disappeared altogether. Cistercian abbeys in their remote fastnesses survive as roofless ruins, uneconomic to remove from the landscape. Urban abbeys and friaries have had mixed fates, some destroyed, others converted into homes and workshops by the ascendant bourgeoisie. In areas like East Anglia, with only flint to build from locally, recycled monasteries are easiest to spot. Quality stone imported from other regions and built into humble houses and barns is a tell-tale sign, even more so when the mediæval carvings are turned outwards. How much more is turned inwards we may never know, short of demolition.

The purchasers of monastic lands were the new men, those who had made their money through industry and the law. One issue still open to research is how they financed the purchases. To be a rich merchant is one thing but if the money is all tied up in the business then further investment can only be made by borrowing against it. The cloth trade had well established links with the Low Countries and with Italy. The intriguing possibility is there that the Protestant Reformation in England was paid for by the bankers of Catholic Italy, who at this time already had their London branches in Lombard Street. That’s how it goes. Business is business.