MILTON ABBEY was founded about 935 by King Athelstan. It was a large house built for forty monks, though with only twelve at the time of the Dissolution. A larger church was built in Norman times, but of this, apart from loose fragments (see below), only ashlar blocks remain, re-used in the present
building. The Norman church was destroyed by fire (‘totaliter inflammavit’ with even ‘columnis decrustatis’) in 1309, and rebuilding must have begun soon. We have no dates for progress, but the style can guide us to a certain extent. Choir, crossing, and transepts were gradually built, but the nave
was left undone. The cloister leant against the N transept. This and the great hall of Abbot Middleton (1481-1525) are all that is left of the monastic parts. The hall is now part of the house.
After the Dissolution Sir John Tregonwell obtained the estate and the buildings, but the church was allowed to become parochial. The ultimate heiress of the Tregonwells married Sir Jacob Bancks, who sold Milton in 1752 to Joseph Damer, a local man who married a daughter of the Duke of Dorset. Damer was created Lord Milton in 1753, and forty years later Earl of Dorchester. Architecturally his is the ownership that matters. From 1852 to 1933 Milton belonged to the Hambros; in 1954 the house became a boys’ public school.
The CHURCH lies S of the house and consists of choir, crossing, and transepts only. It is like a huge Oxford college chapel. The total length is 136 ft. The architecture outside as well as inside is singularly limpid. One might call it classic (not classical). What there is of differences of style does not detract from the clarity.
The earliest parts of the rebuilding do not survive, the retrochoir or ambulatory, the Lady Chapel, and the chapels N and S of the Lady Chapel. Excavations have proved these to have been straight-ended, with the Lady Chapel longer than the others.
The first thing one sees is the E wall of the church with five blocked arches and simple wall-shafts and springers of the rib-vault. The choir with its aisles follows, of seven bays, very uniform in style and hardly possible later than say 1325. All the windows of the aisles as well as most of the clerestory are of three stepped lancet lights, cusped, under one arch with the spandrels pierced.* The aisle parapet has openwork quatrefoils. The E window of the clerestory, above ambulatory and chapels, is of seven stepped lancet lights. Buttresses carry two sets of pinnacles and carry down the thrust from elegant flying buttresses. Inside, the vaults of aisles and choir are quadripartite and have bosses. The piers have strong attached shafts and round moulded capitals, the arches the typically Dec sunk wave mouldings. There are from the W two bays, then a piece of wall, then one more bay, another piece of wall, and another bay. The crossings and transepts continue the same system, although the crossing piers have to each side four, not three shafts. What does now change, however, and radically, is the window tracery. It is flowing, i.e. Late Dec, in the S transept and Perp in the N transept. The great S window is of seven lights and thoroughly reticulated in the tracery. The side windows are partly as in the choir, partly simply flowing (of two lights). The N transept must be Middleton’s. He also was responsible for the lierne-vaults of both transepts,* the parapet of the S transept passage at the level of the clerestory windows with diagonally set pointed quatrefoils, and the crossing tower and its fan-vault. The tower has to each side two long two-light bell-openings and three pinnacles. The N transept is shorter than the S transept and has one eight-light N window, and to N and S one very long three-light window with two transoms.
Against the N wall are the remains of five bays of a passage, with springers for fan-vaults. So this probably represents one of the ranges of the cloister. But which? We can’t say, as nothing is known of the cloister. Normally of course it stretched along the nave. But no nave was ever built. Yet a beginning was made, i.e. the arches from the transepts into the aisles, the E jambs of the first aisle windows, and the first N clerestory window, Perp in detail, were built. The springers of the vault are also at once noticeable. The W porch is by Sir George Gilbert Scott, who restored the church in 1865. James Wyatt had restored it before, in 1789.
FURNISHINGS. The church is exceptionally rich in furnishings. First the fitments of the choir. - REREDOS. A large image wall with three tiers of niches with canopies and a small Latin inscription across referring to Abbot Middleton and a Vicar of Milton Abbas who died in 1510. No-one could call this an imaginative design; there is nothing flamboyant to enjoy. - SEDILIA. Open to the aisle. Typically Dec, with cusped and sub-cusped arches and crockets and finials. - PULPITUM. A solid early C14 structure with a rib-vaulted passage in the middle, decorated by a big leaf boss. Staircases lead up to the loft. The responds of the passage are triple Purbeck shafts. - STALLS. Some parts original, including twelve MISERICORDS of no special interest.
Now the other items in the usual order of The Buildings of England. FONT. By the famous J. A. Jerichau (who died in 1883). Two life-size white angels, one with a cross, the other with a palm-branch. A rock between them and below an insignificant basin. - ALTAR. In the S aisle. By Wyatt. Alabaster with diagonally set pointed quatrefoils and a short frieze of carved drapery above - an oddly naive idea for Wyatt’s age. - PULPIT. Stone, on legs, with panelled sides. - SCREEN. Remains of a closely panelled screen wall in the S transept. - TABERNACLE (chancel). Once suspended over the Pyx, the only English parallel to the German Sakraments-haus, although of wood and not of stone. Square and then hexagonal with a spire. - ARCHITECTURAL FRAGMENTS. A number of Norman and later ones on a rack in the S transept. - There also is the fragment of an Anglo-Saxon CROSS SHAFT with interlace. - SCULPTURE. Upper half of a St James, c.1500 (S choir aisle). From the reredos of the medieval church in the medieval village? - Triptyc h of ivory; probably Spanish. - PAINTINGS. Two incredibly bad panels from a late C15 screen: King Athelstan and Queen Egwyma. - TILES. Some are collected in the S transept. - STAINED GLASS. In the chancel E window some C15 and later fragments. - The gorgeous S transept S window by Hardman, designed by Pugin in 1847. - PLATE. Cross, foreign, C17. - MONUMENTS. Broken incised slab to an Abbot, C13 or early C14, with Lombardic inscription (N transept). - Purbeck marble monument appropriated by Sir John Tregonwell d. 1565. It is the standard type: tomb-chest with cusped quatrefoils, twisted shafts carrying a canopy. Instead of an arch two quadrants and a straight top. Panelled underside. Quatrefoil frieze and cresting. Tregonwell’s is a kneeling brass figure (N aisle). - Mary Bancks d. 1704 and others to 1725. Standing monument with awkwardly reclining effigy. She holds a book and a skull. Reredos with inscription on drapery and three putto-heads in clouds over. Detached Corinthian columns and a partly segmental top. - Lady Milton d. 1775, wife of the builder of the house. Designed by Robert Adam and carved by Agosrino
* But the second and fourth of the clerestory from the E are of two lights.
* One N transept boss refers to a bishop of Winchester who died in 1501.
MILTON ABBAS. We come to it for its lovely street, but more than all for its old abbey, one of the jewels of Dorset. There can hardly have been a day since Alfred’s grandson founded the abbey when it has not been beautiful.
The village was perhaps the most surprising street in England when every cottage had its chestnut tree trimmed and its grass neatly kept; the church, now back in the hands of the Benedictine monks, stands like a monument of the centuries in as rare a piece of country as even an Englishman need wish to see.
The story begins at the top of one of the most remarkable green stairways we have seen: 111 green steps of turf between solid balustrades of yew hedges. Rarely have men and Nature worked together more impressively. At the top of this long flight of steps is a chapel built by Saxons, renewed by Normans, long a pigeon house and a labourer’s cottage, but now a church again. It was on the site of this chapel that Athelstan, First King of All England, camped with his guards on their way North to meet the Danes, and here he dreamed that he would be victorious. The English Chronicle tells us that the dream came true, and Athelstan founded Milton Abbey in memory of his victory.
The church stands by the 18th century house built by the first Earl of Dorchester, who pulled down the ancient town of Milton but left the stately abbey enthroned like a joy for ever on the green lawns, enshrined in a landscape that could hardly be surpassed for beauty. About it are mile after mile of drives through wooded hills, and we may doubt if there are finer shrubberies, greener lawns, and neater cottages anywhere.
Founded in 933, destroyed in a thunderstorm in 1309, and rebuilt in the 14th and 15th centuries, the abbey church remains a noble place, a miniature cathedral in a vast green bowl. Some of its detail (such as the vaulting of the tower) is exquisite.
By the altar are two small doorways, thought to be the oldest things left. Three stone seats under a canopy were built about 1400. Before the altar sleeps Abbot Walter, who knew this place 600 years ago. A fragment of a stone to an abbot of his day lies near a marble group by Augustus Pugin showing Lady Dorchester, “the wisest and most lovely, the best and most virtuous of women,” with her husband bending over her in grief, both wearing the dress that was fashionable in 1775. He was Joseph Damer, who pulled the village down and built the house.
On a canopied altar tomb is a brass showing a kneeling man in Tudor dress; he is Sir John Tregonwell, who helped our Bluebeard King to get rid of some of his wives and was given this place for £1000 as his reward.
It was another John Tregonwell of the next century to whom an astonishing experience came at the abbey. Master Tregonwell was still in charge of his nurse when it happened, for he was only five. The abbey church was in ruin, overgrown with grass, and one of the lofty towers could be climbed by a stone stairway. There little John climbed up with his nurse. It was a summer’s day and the boy, excited at so great a height, reached over the parapet for a wild rose growing there. He lost his hold and fell sixty feet to the ground. The terrified nurse flew down the steps to pick up the battered body, but found Master John picking daisies on the lawn. His stiff Nanking petticoats, such as children wore in the 17th century, had acted as a parachute and floated him safely down to earth so that he was no worse for his fall. He lived to become High Sheriff of Dorset and died at 82, being buried within the abbey walls in 1680. He gave a library of books to the abbey as a thankoffering for his escape from death, and they were chained in the vestry here until, it is said, a vicar took them home and his servants tore their pages out and used them for curlpapers.
On the ground near the tomb of little John’s ancestor is a small brass of John Arthur, a monk of the 15th century. He might have known the abbot of 1461, Walter Middleton, who founded the school at Milton, to which Father Time was one day to bring Nelson’s Hardy, sighing over his arithmetic. His name is symbolised in a niche in the wall showing a mill over a tun with a W pierced by a crozier.
There is a very beautiful tabernacle shaped like a tower, made by a craftsman in wood of 500 years ago. Near it, under a glass case, are a small chalice, part of an abbot’s staff, and the remains of a pair of sandals, all found in a coffin 600 years old.
In this part of the church are fragments of stone ornaments, including a sturdy little man wearing a palmer’s hat and the “scallop shell of quiet.” The scallop shell, being peculiar to the Mediterranean countries the pilgrim had to visit, was chosen as a badge to show that he had been on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Two pictures on the wall of this great place, where everything is as light as day, come from the days when the Wars of the Roses were raging and Caxton was setting up his printing-press at Westminster. They are rich treasures, for one of them is a picture of King Athelstan and the other a portrait of his mother. Here she lies. A thousand years of history have swept past her grave.
The abbey has changed hands in our time and passed into the possession of a group of members of the Church of England believing in spiritual healing, but it is still open for visitors.
Quite apart from the village all this glory lies, and the reason is dramatic. Not quite 200 years ago Milton Abbas village, and everything that it contained, was bought by Joseph Damer, who pulled the whole place down, except the abbey and St Catherine’s Chapel, to build himself a house. The stones were broken up and carted away, the little God’s Acre was changed into a lawn, and in their place the great house of Joseph Damer rose.
We might almost forgive this vandal now, for he did a surprisingly beautiful thing. He built a new village outside his park which was like nothing else in England. Its broad street rises sharply with a slow curve to the left. It has cottages on each side all alike, with yellow walls and thickly thatched and high-pitched roofs. Each cottage had a patch of green and a chestnut tree dividing it from its neighbour.
The water-butts at the side of each cottage were alike, and so were the gardens sloping up steeply for 150 feet at the back, topped by the trees that make the skyline. The new Milton Abbas was, in fact, on the flat bottom of a deeply-cut descending gorge with sloping sides behind the houses for gardens, like the vineyards on an Italian hill, the whole crowned and shut in by trees.
It was all very beautiful in the days before the war, but, as the poet says, there is nothing so beautiful now as it used to be. In those days we saw a lovely cottage there, far from the rnadding crowd, to let for a shilling a week. It is all very beautiful now, but much of its neatness is gone, and the traveller who turns the corner to look up this street may not feel exactly as the traveller felt before the world was changed. Charming it is, but then it was a picture like a poem, a vision like no other in our countryside.
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