Burnham Abbey
Encyclopedia
Burnham Abbey was founded as a house of Augustinian nuns in 1266 by Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall
Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall
Richard of Cornwall was Count of Poitou , 1st Earl of Cornwall and German King...

, King of the Romans
King of the Romans
King of the Romans was the title used by the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire following his election to the office by the princes of the Kingdom of Germany...

, who presented the community with the surrounding lands and the parish church
Parish church
A parish church , in Christianity, is the church which acts as the religious centre of a parish, the basic administrative unit of episcopal churches....

 of Burnham
Burnham, Buckinghamshire
Burnham is a village and civil parish that lies north of the River Thames in the South Bucks District of Buckinghamshire, and sits on the border with Berkshire, between the towns of Maidenhead and Slough. It is served by Burnham railway station in the west of Slough on the main line between London...

 in Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan home county in South East England. The county town is Aylesbury, the largest town in the ceremonial county is Milton Keynes and largest town in the non-metropolitan county is High Wycombe....

. The community consisted of around twenty nuns at the outset, but was never especially wealthy and by the time of the dissolution there were only ten.

History

A complaint was made shortly after the foundation that Richard had diverted a watercourse to the abbey that had been used by a nearby village and that he also had given 20 acres (80,937.2 m²) of common land to the monastery. It is unknown as to whether this issue was resolved.
In 1311 a nun, Margery of Hedsor, left the monastery and her vows and was subsequently excommunicated. This sentence was renewed periodically for some years until it was cancelled by the Bishop for reasons unknown. A serious legal dispute occurred in 1330. This was concerning the ownership of the manor of Bulstrode, which had been granted to the abbey but was claimed by a Geoffrey de Bulstrode, who in protest proceeded to vandalise the property and harass the servants of the abbess. Eventually a commission found in favour of the abbey but by then, substantial losses had been accrued.

Being of little wealth, Burnham Abbey should have been closed in the first wave of the dissolution in 1536, but a petition by local commissioners saved the monastery until its final end in 1539 after which it was leased to William Tyldesley. The church was demolished in about 1570 and a house formed from much of the remaining buildings. By 1719, it was a farm with some of the buildings such as the refectory having become ruinous. In 1913 it was purchased by Lawrence Bissley who restored the remaining buildings and converted the original chapter house into a chapel. In 1916 a community of Anglican Augustinian nuns took possession and began to further restore and extend the abbey for their own use.
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