The night stair, Furness Abbey

One of the attractive things about England, for those of us who have our ancestry here, is the immediate access to history. Walking Darwin’s circular thinking path, the Sand-walk at Down House, where he lived and worked for 40 years, where he wrote The Origin of Species, for instance. Or standing in the low roofed parlour where Wordsworth (or his sister Dorothy) wrote down the poems that he had composed while walking the fells around Grasmere. And then walking the mountains ourselves. Today we had a picnic, in the drizzle, in the ruins of Kendal Castle. Two pink clad girls were clambering up and down the walls, up to the great hall, down to the cellars, oblivious of both history and safety warnings. It’s an adventure playground, part of their landscape, nothing special. Ruined castles are a dime a dozen, as are ruined abbeys. In fact I played in one as a young girl, at Bury St Edmonds.

Unlike the slow demise of the castles though, the ruin of the abbeys was historically dramatic. Between 1536 and 1541 Henry VIII dissolved over 800 monasteries in England and Wales. Most were physically destroyed: burnt first, to extract valuable lead from roofs and plumbing; stone and slate removed and recycled in new buildings; furnishings sold; tombs plundered; precious metals melted down; relics destroyed. Their libraries were simply lost. The history is complex of course, and corruption and decline at least part of the story, but having been immersed in the study of Christian monasticism over the last couple of years I find this “No” of the English church to the monastic way of life somewhat confronting! (In France the story is different, but no less torrid.) The dissolution of the monasteries reshaped the landscape of Christianity in England: it is as if the abbey ruins are scattered across the land to remind us of a wrong turn, and how the Reformation put us spiritually back on track. More cynically, they are a reminder of how Henry broke the power of the church, and helped put us on the road toward a secular state.

In the end I find the ruined monasteries sad. Christianity becomes a lonelier project I think, with the solitary village parson tending his little flock. Did Thomas Cranmer really imagine his transformed monastic offices, morning and evening prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, would be prayed together, daily in parishes? In human-sized communities of encouragement and support? Perhaps this is why a “new monasticism” just might be worth a thought.

• For Darwin’s house see http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/the-home-of-charles-darwin-down-house/.


• The Wordsworth Trust runs a wonderful programme from Dove House - http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/index.asp . We managed to get restricted view tickets (behind a church pillar!) to a reading by British poet Simon Armitage.


• Furness Abbey, a Cistercian house, was the first of the large monasteries to surrender to Henry VIII. The monastery had taken part in the Pilgrimage of Grace, a mass protest movement that began in York in 1536: surrender was an expedient alternative to trial for treason. Other resistant abbots were executed. http://cistercians.shef.ac.uk/abbeys/furness.php .