Roche Abbey

[deejayone]

ROCHE ABBEY

The ruins of Roche Abbey lie in the wooded valley of the Maltby Beck, about 9 miles from Doncaster and 13 miles from Sheffield in South Yorkshire.

Now looked after by English Heritage: http://www.english-h...es/roche-abbey/

PICTURES

A selection of pictures around Roche Abbey taken by myself and my partner over the past couple of years:

[SteveHB]

The history of Roche Abbey, from its foundation to its dissolution (1870)

Author: J. H. Aveling, 1828-1892.

Internet Archive, www.archive.org/details/cu31924028012775

[Bayleaf]

This is from an article in Current Archaeology, May 2008, on the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

From Roche Abbey in South Yorkshire we have a very rare account of the speed and completeness with which a proud monastery could be brought low.

It was written by Michael Sherbrook, Rector of Wickersley from 1567 to c.1610.

He was only a child at the time of the Dissolution, but he recorded the memories of his father and uncle who witnessed the spoilation of Roche at first hand.

First the Royal Commissioners took their toll: the lead was stripped from the roof and smelted into transportable blocks in the nave; the site of the furnace is still visible.

The yeomen and gentlemen of the County were then offered the better timber from the church. The monks were left with nothing; one of them approached Sherbrook's uncle and offered to sell him the door of his cell for two pennies. He declined the offer - not out of moral scruple, but because he couldn't think of a use for it.

Others found uses for just about everything from the window glass to the service books - taken and sold to hauliers, who used the parchment to patch the coverings on their wagons; and from iron wall hooks to choir stalls, whose fate was to be used as firewood.

Shirebrook writes " All things of value were spoiled, plucked away or utterly defaced... and it seemed that every person was intent upon filching or spoiling what he could. Even those who had been content to permit the monks' worship and do great reverence at their matins, masses and services two days previously were no less happy to pilfer, which is strange, that they could one day think it to be the house of God and the next the house of the Devil".

Some 30 years later he asked his father "why were you so ready to destroy and spoil the thing that you had previously thought so well of?" His answer probably speaks for the thousands of others who also participated in that swift and brutal destruction of centuries of heritage: everyone else was doing it, he said, and surely he had as much right to share in the profit as anyone else? "I saw that everything would disappear and therefore I did as others did."

Then in 1775, Capability Brown found the ruins of Roche Abbey so entrancing he landscaped the ruins and made the two surviving towers a key feature in the wooded parkland he created for Lord Scarborough.