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Cistercian Abbeys: BINDON Name: BINDON Location: nr Wareham
County: Dorset William de Glastonia originally proposed that a group of monks should be sent out from Forde abbey and colonise a new foundation at the coastal site of Little Bindon. The monks, however, soon found the new location physically too demanding. Not long after, Robert de Newburgh and his wife stepped in as patrons, and it was through their endowments that the monks were able to move, in 1172, to the more suitable location at Bindon.(1) The house was much favoured by the Plantagenet royal dynasty: the abbot was employed by King John in affairs of a confidential nature; in 1215 some of the royal treasure was deposited there; Henry III was known to favour the community to whom, in 1229 and 1247, he granted them letters of protection; in 1272 Henry and his wife Eleanor accepted their election as patrons of the house; in the reign of Edward II the house was twice called on to assist in the war against the Scots.(2) Nevertheless the community at Bindon was still to have its share of strife. By the fourteenth-century the house was troubled by internal disorder: in 1296 the abbot was accused of causing the death of two monks and by 1329 the house was said to be ‘grievously burdened with debt for want of good rule’.(3) In 1535 the abbey was recorded as having a net
annual income of £147 and thus came under the first act
of suppression which dissolved all houses with an annual income
under
£200. In 1536 Abbot John Norman paid the sum of £300
to avoid suppression, but the respite lasted only a short while
and the house fell with the larger monasteries in 1539.(4) In
1559 Thomas Howard built a house on the site of the abbey, although
it
was burnt down almost a century later during the English civil
war. During the eighteenth-century a small house and gothic-style
gatehouse
were built on the site. Both of these buildings survive today.
The ruins of the abbey, which are privately owned, include the
low outer
walls of the church, together with various traces of the monastic
buildings.(5) Recently, Bindon
Abbey has gained additional fame as
the proposed site of fictional events in Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess
of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Hardy made the nearby Woolbridge
Manor House the site of Tess and Angel Clare’s ill-fated honeymoon.
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