Netley Abbey
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. The fact of its founder prior death before designation of the endowment was complete, put the incipient abbey in a difficult financial situation. It is thought that only after the house was taken under the wing of Henry III, who became interested in it in the mid-1240s, was progress made on the buildings. The King eventually assumed the role of patron in 1251.Buildings
Church
The fruits of royal patronage were demonstrated by the construction of a large church, 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. Construction of the church proceeded from east to west. The sanctuary and transepts were built first to allow the monks to hold services, and the nave was completed over time. It is not known precisely when the building work began, but major gifts by King Henry of roofing timber and lead from Derbyshire in 1251 and 1252 indicate that some of the eastern parts of the church, and probably of the east cloister range too, had by then reached an advanced stage. The presence of a foundation stone at the base of the southeast pier of the crossing inscribed "H. DI. GRA REX ANGE" shows that the foundations of the centre of the church reached ground level after 1251, the year Henry III formally became the abbey's patron. Taking many decades to complete, the church was probably finished between 1290 and 1320. Dating the various parts of the building relies predominantly on stylistic criteria.The church was cruciform in shape, with vaulting and a square sanctuary and a low central tower containing bells. It was aisled throughout, with a pair of chapels on the east side of each transept. There was no triforium, but a narrow gallery surmounted by a clerestory of triple lancet windows ran above each bay of the arcade, as can be seen in the surviving section in the south transept. The vaulting sprang directly from the top of the arcade. The wall at the eastern end of the sanctuary, probably built after 1260, had a large window which features an upper rose and elaborate tracery; the aisle windows were simple paired lancets recessed within an arch. In the nave, the south aisle had plain triple lancets set high in the wall to avoid the cloister roof. The north aisle windows by contrast had richly decorated cusped tracery, reflecting the changes in taste over the long period of construction, and suggesting that this was among the last parts of the church to be finished, probably in the very late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries. The west wall of the church also has a large window, the tracery of which was destroyed in a collapse during the eighteenth century. Surviving fragments show that it was built in a "freer and more advanced style" than other parts of the church, and suggest a date around the turn of the fourteenth century.
Internally, the church was subdivided into several areas. The high altar was against the east wall of the sanctuary, flanked by two smaller altars on the side walls. To the west, under the tower, were the monks' choir stalls where they sat during services, and further west was a pulpitum or rood screen, which blocked access to the ritual areas of the church. 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.
Unlike other orders of monks who allowed parishioners and visitors admission to the nave, the Cistercians officially reserved their churches solely for the use of the monastic community. Others had to worship in a separate chapel in the abbey grounds close to the main gate. 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 floors were covered in polychrome encaustic tiles featuring foliage, heraldic beasts, and coats of arms including those of England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Queen Eleanor of Castile, Richard of Cornwall and many powerful noble families. The chapels in the south transept had tiles with symbols of Edward the Confessor and the Virgin Mary. 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.
Cloister and east range
South of the church stands a cloister surrounded by ranges of buildings on three sides, the church forming the fourth. As is known, the cloister was the heart of the abbey, where the monks spent most of their time when not in church, engaged in study, copying books and the creation of illuminated manuscripts. 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.The east range, which was started at the same time as the church and probably took about 10 years to build, contained many of the abbey's most important rooms. The vaulted library and sacristy were on the ground floor, adjacent to the church. To the south was the chapter house, where the deliberations of the abbey took place and the monks met to transact business and to listen to a daily reading of a chapter of the Rule of St Benedict. 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. The windows on either side of the door would have been unglazed, so as to allow representatives of the laybrothers to listen to debates. The chapter house was also the site of some tombs, traditionally those of the abbots of a monastery. When the room was excavated, archaeologists discovered scattered human remains and evidence of graves beneath the medieval floor level, indicating that a number of burials.
The parlour lies south, an austere, barrel vaulted room little more than a passageway through the building. Here the monks could talk without disturbing the silence in the cloister, which Cistercian rules insisted on. 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, but as time went on it may have been converted into the misericord 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 which ran the length of the building. This was entered by two staircases: the day stair went down into the cloister in the south-east corner; the night stair led into the south transept of the church to allow the monks to get easily from bed to choir at night. Initially the dormitory was an open hall, with the monks' beds placed along the walls, one under each of the small, slit-like windows. During the fourteenth century, when views of the necessity of sleeping in the same space together for the common life changed, 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.