The Abbey before the Reformation
W.J. Petchey  

All that can now be seen of Beeleigh Abbey are the roofs of its surviving range of late-medieval buildings, viewed from a public garden on the west side of Maldon. From a footpath beside the abbey can be glimpsed the picturesque farmhouse which was built about 1570 on to that surviving range of the original abbey. The place is privately owned and not open to visitors but it is possible with a little imagination to reconstruct what the abbey would have been like and, more importantly, how it was used in the years immediately preceding its dissolution in 1536.

How can we tell what Beeleigh Abbey was like before it was dissolved?

i) Evidence from the Inventory of 1536
Late in the afternoon of 6 June, 1536, the last Abbot of Beeleigh, John Copsheath, was left with a duplicate of the official inventory of his abbey's goods and chattels "safely to be kept to the use of our sovereign lord" Henry VIII. Its annual gross income fell below the £300 ceiling set by the Act for the Dissolution of Monasteries; it was to cease being an endowed religious community of canons following the Rule established by St. Norbert in 1119. (The Order was known as Premonstratensian from the place near Laon in N.E. France where St. Norbert's first abbey was established.) The inventory would be needed when the site, the lands, the buildings and their contents, were either leased or sold by the Crown.

ii) Other Evidence
     To the Inventory can be added:

-Some scraps of information in the grant of the former abbey to Sir John Gates (1540).
-Bequests made by wills in 1495, 1498 and 1505.
-Comments by the Visitor (a Church official) about the buildings in four reports made   between 1482 and 1500.
-Evidence about the architecture and size of the place which the surviving parts of the eastern range supply. In particular, these provide the dimensions -the width, height and breadth- of the bays or units that were presumably common to all the buildings around the central cloistered courtyard.

Looking at the Evidence.
When Henry VIII's Commissioners toured Beeleigh Abbey with their clerk to gather information for their Inventory they would have done so in such a way as would prevent them from missing any part and save them from too much doubling back. So we might think that simply by reading the Inventory we could get a pretty good idea of what the Abbey looked like before 1536.  But the Inventory was not compiled for the benefit of historians - it was strictly for the business of valuing saleable items, and empty rooms were omitted.  In particular the Inventory does not mention a Common (or Warming)  Room or a Chapter House, although every abbey had them.  So where were Beeleigh's?

Here the surviving buildings can help us: the Common Room and the Chapter House can be identified as the surviving ground floor components of this eastern range of this abbey. By combining the evidence in this way we can reconstruct a plan of the Abbey.

A walk round Beeleigh Abbey in 1536

(i) Living arrangements.

The First Floor
We can begin where the Inventory itself does: upstairs on the first floor at the room which has often been called the Canons' Dormitory.  This is not a very good name - as we shall see,  the last canons did not sleep in a communal dormitory but had individual accommodation. The Inventory calls the room the Great Chamber, as if it were part of a manor house. Its two beds, with bedding and curtains, the fireplace and the "old cloths or pieces of tapestry" on its walls suggest this large room with five windows and a wide timber roof served, by about 1500 as accommodation for members of the Bourchier family, Earls of Essex, who were the abbey's patrons and guardians.

From there we can move with the Commissioners to the next first floor space, the Children's Chamber, a name which is the only indication of the abbey's former role as a place for the tuition of schoolboys. Only one bed is mentioned but even until the mid-19th century children often slept several to one bed.

Next the Commissioners moved into the Dining Parlour or Refectory. As in other Premonstratensian houses it was on the south side of the cloister and on the first floor. It must have been almost as large as the Great Chamber and it was furnished with a long table on trestles with four forms. The Inventory says that to go at the table head and foot there were chairs -unusual furniture in 1536- of which one was covered with leather. There were three wall hangings painted "with steyned worke" and "iiii carpetts for wyndowes," meaning that there were four windows with thickly woven hangings acting as curtains.

The table furnishings were stored elsewhere but can be brought here to show how the community and its guests fared on feast days. There were:

• Three diapered table cloths and six "pleyne table clothes."
   
• 26 napkins, two diaper towels, three "pleyne wesshyng towells" to keep hands clean whilst eating greasy or sticky food, with three pewter basins and two pewter ewers for the water.
   
• Two silver-gilt salts, 18 silver spoons and three bowls ("masers") hooped with silver-gilt bands to be set on the Table. These are the most valuable domestic items in the Inventory.
   
• Three other salts, of pewter, and six copper or brass candlesticks.

Onto the table there then came, as needed, some of the abbey's 30 pewter platters, 27 pewter dishes, 13 porringers, 11 "sawsers of ii [two] sorts" and "a dosen of banketewynge [banqueting] vessell[s]." From the kitchen with its five iron spits, three iron racks, two trivets, four brass pots, the great cauldron, colander, frying pan and "great dryping panne" the food was conveyed on a "charger" and a pewter plate.

So far the Commissioners have passed from the Chapter House to the Common Room (empty) in the eastern range, then gone up to the huge Great Chamber above those first two areas. and then - moving into the first floor chambers of the southern range- through the Children's Chamber to the Dining Parlour. Beyond that they must have found a kind of Screens Passage.  In  a college or manor house this would have separated the dining area from the buttery and kitchen. But at Beeleigh those were on the ground floor (with the kitchen most probably a high, two-storeyed room) and this first floor passage must have had a staircase leading down to the kitchen or buttery.

The Commissioners, however, remained on the top floor. Emerging from the Dining Parlour, they turned right into the western range of the Abbey.  Here they found an unexpected domestic arrangement. Their Inventory refers to a series of Chambers apparently occupied by up to six canons and three or four servants. So no communal dormitory for these late-mediaeval religious: they had their own rooms.

The first of these chambers was called The White Chamber. It had a fireplace and a fine bed and what  the Inventory calls a "Servant's Chamber next to the same," although it cannot have been strictly speaking adjacent for reason which will be clear in a moment. A third room, The Green Chamber, must have been immediately to the north of this Servant's Chamber and have abutted on the western end of the abbey church because it was the last room to be described on this first floor level (see the plan.).  At this Green Chamber the Commissioners evidently retraced their steps through the Servant's Chamber.  But now a peculiar thing happens - by doing this they  came to "the Chamber under the White Chamber," i.e. on the ground floor. How did they get there?  The Inventory gives us a clue when it refers to some bed furnishings stored in "a great chest next to the same (White) Chamber."  The chest was in a space between The White Chamber and its Servant's Chamber like the stair passages which in Oxford and Cambridge colleges serve pairs of rooms on each floor level.  It must have contained stairs leading to a landing, and it was these stairs which the Commissioners used.

The Ground Floor
On the ground floor of this western range were two more rooms lying no doubt directly beneath the Servant's Chamber and The Green Chamber, and northward of the stairway space. These were probably entered from the western Cloister Walk. One was another servant's chamber, the other was described only as "another chamber." Each contained a bed with sheets, blankets and coverlets, as did all the rooms in this western range. The Inventory would not include personal possessions such as chairs or stools, desks or tables with which these rooms must have been furnished, although  in any case their owners may have already left the abbey and taken them.

Domestic life in Beeleigh Abbey.
At this point the Inventory ends its inspection of the domestic quarters and if these were all the chambers that the Abbey had then in its last thirty or so years it had accommodated itself to a falling number of inmates (11 in 1482, 9 in 1500) and a revised way of life. The place was more like a small Cambridge college than a monastery. But it was far more sumptuous accommodation than most colleges at that time. Each of those chambers must have been two bays in width (if only one bay deep), which would mean rooms twenty feet by ten (200 sq. ft.). The surviving buildings were beautifully reconstructed in the early 13th century of Reigate stone, (a kind of chalk) and, for the columns in the Chapter House and Common Room, Purbeck marble. The western range, with a columned "undercroft" at ground level (used for storage,) Children's Chamber and Dining Parlour above, may well have been in the same style and of the magnificence of the remains of the Refectory of another Premonstratensian house, Easby Abbey near Richmond, N. Yorks.

(ii) In the Church.

Relics: Beeleigh's own saint.
There is every reason to suppose that the abbey church, to which the Commissioners next directed their attention, was as imposing as Beeleigh's domestic buildings. It probably was, since by 1249 there was enshrined at its high altar the heart of St. Roger Niger of "Bileye," who was most probably one of the earliest members of this community after it was settled in Beeleigh about 1185. He had become successively archdeacon of Colchester and Bishop of London and was canonized shortly after his death in 1241. He was buried in London in St. Paul's Cathedral except for his heart, which was encased in lead (this was a quite usual practice) and brought back to the place after which he had been named. A holy relic, it would attract pilgrims and their offerings.

In 1507 a Maldon man, John Ormesby, added "a relic of the Holy Cross of the Sepulchre of Christ and of the Crib and Stall of Christ, enclosed in beryl" to the relic collection at Beeleigh. But these were not found by the Commissioners and had doubtless been destroyed between 1534 and 1536, as were most relics in England.

What did the Abbey Church look like?

The church had a steeple. It was not specified in the Inventory (so it had no bells in it by 1536) but it appears in a list of debts still owed by the abbey at the dissolution: £6 was owed to John Maundye of Maidstone for eight windows for the steeple. In 1540 the premises were sold, the records show, to John Gates Esq. including "all the church, the bell tower and the cemetery."  The number of windows mentioned in the steeple tower argues for a taller structure than would easily rise over a central crossing of nave, presbytery and transepts, so the spire must have been either at the west end of the nave (as at Shap Abbey, Cumbria) or against the north transept (as at Blanchland Abbey, County Durham). Because the ground beyond the north transept was close to the river Chelmer, the western position, on more stable land, seems a more likely location.

The Commissioners went straight through the Canons' Choir, which would be in the crossing of the east-west, north-south areas, up to the High Altar, whose furnishings they carefully appraised: its alabaster reredos, the curtains, carpeting, brass and gilt copper cross, candlesticks and service books. Three of these books they reckoned to be worth a lot of money to other Premonstratensian communities (abroad, presumably): they talk about "2 great antiphoners in parchment, written of their own Use (the liturgy particular to this Order) worth to be sold to men of their religion: £4" and "a great mass book [missal] of their Use, limned with gold, appraised and to men of their religion: 66s 8d [£3.33]."

The Commissioners then they moved south into the Lady Chapel which contained "a pair of organs," an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary with a branched candlestick of latten before it, and an altar "hanged with stained work [painted textile]" and beside it mass vestments of white Bruges satin.

The Lady Chapel and The Bourchier Tomb.

We know where the Lady Chapel was by a survival that can still be seen (but not at Beeleigh), and an associated bequest which shows that there were at least two arches separating the chapel from the choir. In 1498 Dame Elizabeth Bourchier, widow of Sir John Bourchier, required by her will that her late husband's corpse be brought from Stebbing parish church (some 18 miles away) to Beeleigh Abbey to be buried with hers under a tomb which was to be constructed "twixt the Choir and the foresaid Chapel of Our Lady" and next the tomb of her late father-in-law Henry Bourchier, Earl of Essex and Eu (who had died in 1483) and his wife Isabel Plantagenet, aunt of King Edward IV.

The Earl's and Countess' tomb of 1483 can still be seen: it was moved by their descendant, Henry Bourchier, fourth and last Earl of Essex, between 1536 and his death in 1540. It stands between the chancel and south chapel of Little Easton parish church, just as it had been sited at Beeleigh. There is a gangway between the east end of the tomb and the supporting columns of its stone canopy, a gangway which, in its original position would provide a way from the Choir and Presbytery into the Lady Chapel.

More chapels.

There were three more chapels within the church to be inspected. Their locations on the plan are conjectural. The Jesus Chapel may have been positioned to the north of the Choir, balancing the Lady Chapel, because outsiders were intended to have access to it.  We know this because of a will made in 1505 by one William Malb, a layman who had retired to live as a "commensal" of the abbey -in effect, a boarder- following the death of his wife.. His desire to have "a stone of remembrance" set in the chapel wall and his request that those attending Mass there should recite the Paternoster and Ave kneeling either in or "afore the said chapel" indicate that it was a stone building to which the laity frequently came, with an entrance within church.

The other two chapels were the Rood Chapel and St. Katherine's Chapel. A Rood was the Old English word for the Holy Cross which was placed on a screen and loft or platform between the Nave and the Choir of every church before 1549. So the Rood Chapel was in the Nave at Beeleigh. The Commissioners ordered some timber to be sold - obscurely describing it as being "the backside of the Rood in the Rood Chapel." The site of St. Katherine's Chapel must remain guesswork. The officials came last to it in their tour of the church and it seems to require the existence of a North Aisle  so that it would not block the Nave. But because visitors also needed access to the Jesus Chapel without passing through the canon's Choir it has been placed midway in the North Aisle on the conjectural plan.

(iii) Buildings and land outside the Church.   Seditious sympathies in the Vestry.
Leaving the church the Commissioners visited the Vestry. The five altars in the church were not provided with vestments, hangings or plate to any great value, and they discovered that the thirteen processional copes and sixteen sets of mass vestments stored there were mostly old. The Bourchier family who acted as patrons of the abbey, and had in the 15th century adopted it as their preferred burial place, had donated many of the vestments and the sight of them may have interested the Commissioners, for they were decorated with the badges of the Bourchier and Stafford families and one in particular was, after 1485, politically very incorrect: "a of blue velvet with fetter locks and Bourchier knots." Those were badges of the House of York (the fetter locks) and of Henry Bourchier, Earl of Essex, and his Plantagenet Yorkist wife. Throughout their reigns Henry VII and Henry VIII sought occasion to destroy the surviving branches of the House of York, and here in 1536 was a religious community still displaying Yorkist affiliations.

The Outer Parts.

Finally the Commissioners moved to the outer areas, traversing the cloister from the vestry to the Kitchen and Buttery (see the description of the Canons' Dining Parlour.) The final part of the claustral buildings was "the Fermory" or Infirmary which probably stood close to the Kitchen for ease of supplying sick canons with convalescent food. Then they moved to the byres, stables, pig sty, sheep pens and the abbey's mill. Their list of 11 horses, 30 cattle, 160 sheep, 4 sows "called shetes," a boar, two carts and 6 loads of hay are a reminder that this abbey was also a working farm concentrating on animal husbandry. 34 fields and 4 groves of woodland are listed in the Crown grant of the Abbey lands to John Gates.

Nowadays the remains of Beeleigh Abbey are approached by a minor road, but the Crown grant refers to a "Long Haure house called the Gatehouse."  This phrase is best explained (remembering that this is an abbey and that it was situated on the south bank of the tidal River Chelmer), as referring to a building in which sculls ("long oars") were kept. That is to say, many people and the canons themselves arrived or departed in rowing boats.

Final Comments on the life at Beeleigh.

It is natural that documents produced by the process of dissolution and secularisation should emphasise the domestic and agricultural aspect of medieval monasticism, but in the case of the last White Canons of Beeleigh this may have been well justified. Beeleigh Abbey was very similar to the smaller colleges of Cambridge in the 1520s in its way of life; it was the comfortable though by no means luxurious home of a small community of studious, conventionally pious celibates who probably adopted a life-style reminiscent of that developed by the Brethren of the Common Life just across the sea in the Low Countries.