I have the great fortune of spending every other Christmas in Kansas City with my wife’s family. My mother-in-law is a physician by trade but, by real vocation, a dedicated antique dealer. As part of the antique-dealing set in Kansas City, she maintains an active social circle. The highlight of my Christmas seasons there is when we make the journey up a long driveway to the top of the hill for drinks at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Barry Cooper, seasoned veterans of the local antiquarian community.

The Coopers have lived in Kansas City for more than sixty years and are dedicated Anglophiles. Their house is in many ways an English country house transported wholesale into the middle of suburban Kansas. For some forty years they kept a second home in Woodstock in the Cotswolds, and it was there that they cultivated their love of antique-seeking and selling. They are a generous couple, and every time my wife and I visit their home, they present us with little thoughtful finds from the year’s hunting.

This Christmas past, Mrs. Cooper gave my wife a lovely matching set of table linens, and she placed in my hands a small, attractive, white vellum hardback book. On the front was a gold-embossed seal—ecclesiastical, clearly, with a little church at its center and a Latin legend running around its circumference. Once deciphered, it read, “St Peter’s Church, Chertsey.” Along the spine in gold lettering was a line from Richard III: “Come Now Towards Chertsey.”

I opened the front cover to find the title, A Brief History of the Catholic Church Around Chertsey, 666 to 1922, by E. M. Harting. Mrs. Cooper mentioned that she knew from my mother-in-law that I was Catholic and had an interest in history, and so this seemed just the thing. It very much was.

I had encountered the name Chertsey before, though not from any recollection of Richard III. A quick look at Google Maps confirmed that it is a small town no more than twenty minutes from where my wife and I had recently settled in Richmond upon Thames. And within this pleasant white vellum book of local ecclesiastical history was contained the story of Chertsey Abbey, a Benedictine abbey that was the heart of Catholic life in that part of Surrey for several centuries, until it was finally destroyed, along with so many others, by Henry VIII.

The book is, I believe, long out of print, the product of a limited run from a local publishing house, and this may well be one of the few surviving copies. But the story contained within made me want to write and share something of it.

The town of Chertsey is around twenty-five or so miles outside of London and at the time of the abbey’s establishment in 666 was a sparsely populated sandy waste, chiefly known for its excellent weirs for taking fish along the Thames and the River Wey. Chertsey Abbey was founded in this sodden part of Southeast England by Saint Erkenwald and dedicated to Saint Peter. Born into Anglo-Saxon pagan nobility, Erkenwald preached in the surrounding countryside for several years before his appointment as bishop of London.

The first abbey was very small. The monks’ dwellings were simple structures made of wattle, interwoven between posts and plastered over with mud and thatched with reeds. The monastery church was made of split timber, plastered with mud and roofed with thatch. The abbey grounds at this time were completed by an outer rampart containing a barn and a cow byre.

The abbey’s construction was sponsored by a Saxon lord named Frithwald, who was sub-regulus of the province of Surrey, under the vassalage of Wulfhere, king of the Mercians. Its grounds expanded with grants of land from King Alfred and King Athelstan. The monks of the abbey dedicated themselves diligently to the work of evangelizing and educating. Harting says of the abbots who ruled Chertsey and similar abbeys in this part of England:

The heads of the great monastic houses were entirely responsible for the gradual civilisation and education of the people among whom they lived. Vast improvements in agriculture and commerce were effected in all districts where the abbeys held manorial rights. The church estates included not only a large portion of north-west Surrey, but temporalities in Middlesex and Berkshire, and spiritualities in Berkshire and Cardigan. In the vicinity of the abbey, much was accomplished. The Thames was embanked, a stone bridge was thrown over the Wey, two mills built, fish ponds dug, new cottages built for fishermen, a vineyard planted upon St Anne’s Hill, all under the direction of various abbots.

The abbey’s work was twice interrupted by the extreme violence of the Danes. An invasion in 871 left ninety monks dead. The abbey was only re-established a century later, by King Edgar and Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester. Orthodox Christians in England record April 23 as the day of the “Venerable Martyrs of Chertsey Beocca, Hethor, and ninety monks with them slaughtered by the heathen Danes.” The monastery was devastated by the Danes once again in 1010. Several decades later, the abbey endured yet more damage during the Norman Conquest, when the Conqueror, on his circuitous march to London, laid waste to the country through which he passed. However, King William and his successors swiftly came to show great favor and patronage to the abbey.

In 1110 a serious effort was made to lift the abbey out of its poor state. It fell to Hugh of St Swithun’s, Winchester, who was abbot for twenty-two years, to begin the great task of restoring the monastery. The abbey’s greatest period of development occurred in the fourteenth century under Abbot John de Rutherwyk, often referred to as its second founder, who oversaw the building of its magnificent cathedral-sized church with its immense nave, two hundred seventy-five feet in length; its aisles, transepts, and choir; the curious apsidal end to its sanctuary; and its side chapels. Its cruciform outline and its central tower and spire would have, in Harting’s words, “dominated the low-lying country for many miles.”

Life at Chertsey Abbey followed a stable and highly regulated rhythm for several centuries. The community’s routine was structured around daily celebration of the Divine Office in choir and multiple Masses, alongside the management of the abbey’s estates and extensive agricultural activity. A substantial part of monastic activity was devoted to intellectual and scribal work: copying and illuminating biblical and liturgical texts as well as transcribing works in theology, philosophy, medicine, logic, grammar, history, and canon law.

In 1471 Chertsey Abbey became the temporary resting place of the gentle but ineffectual Henry VI, a fact that explains the reference to Richard III on the spine of Harting’s little book. Henry’s interment at the abbey is mentioned in act I, scene ii, when Lady Anne Neville says to those bearing the body of the king from London, “Come now towards Chertsey with your holy load.” In his grim wooing of Anne, Richard feigns penitence for stabbing Henry to death and tells her that she can leave the burial of her father-in-law to him and that he will come see her after he has “solemnly interred / At Chertsey monastery, this noble king, / And wet his grave with my repentant tears.”

Richard, of course, has no intention of acting as chief mourner to the man he brutally dispatched and, having conspicuously signaled his virtue to the grieving Anne, leaves disposal of the burial to others.

A plan of the abbey, copied into its cartulary in 1454, shows it at its zenith. The first thing one notices is that the abbey’s grounds look like an island surrounded by the Thames. The Thames runs along the northern edge and bends away eastward to the single bridge that carried the road over the water; and from the loop of Penton Hook the Abbey River breaks off, doubles back along the south and west, and rejoins the parent stream, so that the whole demesne lies girdled about by moving water.

At the low center of the plan stands the immense abbey church, visible for miles to passers-by, and the one building the draughtsman troubled to draw in full elevation, with its long aisled body, its tall spire, and the cross set above. Close by are several working buildings, including the Burway Barn and, off to the east where the current could be made to turn a wheel, the Oxlake Mill. Almost everything else the plan records is pasture, water, or willow. The meadows lie in a ring about the buildings and take their names from the ground: the Meadow of Stert and the Meadow of Mixtenham to the north and west, the broad Laleham Burway at the center, the Mill-meadow enclosed within the causeway’s arm, and the Oxlake Meadow spreading east toward the river. These meadows would have contained fertile orchards and teeming fishponds. Among the meadows the draughtsman has sketched the osier beds, where the monks grew the willows used to make baskets and eel-traps. Across the northern bank, beyond the abbey’s own bounds, stands the neighboring village of Laleham, which closes the view at the top of the sheet.

Its landholdings, long history of royal patronage, and agricultural activity made Chertsey wealthy, and a choice target for the rapacious son of Henry Tudor. Harting drily notes that what the Danes “accomplished by massacre in 871 was more effectively contrived by Henry VIII when he closed the Abbey in 1537.” A deed of surrender was signed, without much protest, by Abbot John Cordery, transferring all the goods and legal entitlements of the abbey to the Crown. Harting muses that the unhappy abbot’s seeming passivity in signing the deed can be put down to a delusional trust in the soundness of the king’s promises that after signing away the abbey, the monks would be allowed to live in peace at a smaller abbey at nearby Bisham. These hopes were swiftly dashed, and the house too was suppressed within six months of its inhabitants’ departure from Chertsey. It would be nearly four centuries before a Catholic church would be permanently re-established in the district of Chertsey.

With the surrender of the monastery and the transfer of all its goods and holdings into the coffers of the Crown, its doors were forever closed to “all education for the proletariat, closed to all beneficent aid for the sick and needy.” Indeed, the doors and stones of the abbey itself were soon to be repurposed to further Henry’s ends. The king had commenced building his palace at Oatlands in nearby Weybridge in January 1538, where he intended to receive Anne of Cleves. The material used for the foundations was brought from the rapidly demolished abbey, a fact confirmed when excavations undertaken at Oatlands in 1920 showed that many carved stones, broken and mutilated, came from the fallen Benedictine monastery. Recounting all of this, Harting’s anger boils over:

These mutilated carvings, the broken shield of stone bearing the insignia of the abbey, the keys of St Peter and the sword of St Paul, the headless figure whose ample robes suggest the choir cope of a monk, part of a piscina—all these stones cry aloud to heaven of the wanton destruction of that famous monastery.

There was one treasure from Chertsey Abbey that survived the Crown’s looting: the famous Chertsey tiles, among the finest examples of medieval decorative tiles in British collections. Many of the tiles, which have been reassembled by curators in the British Museum, depict scenes from the Crusades, including a stylized duel between Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, with the former driving his lance through the latter’s heart. The working theory is that they were commissioned in the mid-thirteenth century by Henry III and Eleanor of Provence.

The likely reason they were not pried up and sold is that the tiles were far less valuable than materials that could be melted down for silver or gold. As a result, when the abbey’s buildings were demolished, the tiles were simply covered over with soil and thereby preserved. The tiles were first excavated in the mid-nineteenth century, and the finds were subsequently dispersed across several British collections, including Chertsey Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Guildford Museum, and the British Museum, where they are today. Interest in the tiles as a subject of art-historical study revived in the late 2010s, when scholars from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, digitally reconstructed several of the fragmentary designs. The reconstructions were displayed at the school in 2023.

The several centuries after the fall of the abbey were a grim period for those few remaining Catholics in the Chertsey area, who were subject to severe fines for recusancy, social opprobrium, and the risk of imprisonment or worse if found to be harboring priests, especially Jesuits. Harting writes movingly of this period:

Heroism and endurance are not dull things; they stand out in a pageant with even greater effect than triumph and applause. The gorgeous vestments and jeweled miters gave way to unobtrusive substitutes: the rough altar stone, makeshift chasubles and stoles . . . coarse black linen for Masses for the dead, and small crosses made of common braid, simply sewn for ease of concealment and portability. Even on high days and holy days there was an attempted grandeur in chasubles of shot blue and green—non-canonical colours, but the best available.

Though severely repressed, the faith was never eradicated from Chertsey. Secret Masses continued right up until Parliament legislated for Catholic relief and eventual emancipation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Through the endurance and sacrifices of this small band of recusants, the faith persisted and was eventually able to find public expression once again, first via mission chapels established in the late nineteenth century and finally with the construction of St Anne’s Church in 1930.

The story of Catholicism in the United Kingdom over the last two hundred years or so has been, measured against the sweep of history since the destruction of Chertsey Abbey, a rather positive one. It is a story of gradual toleration, legal and political emancipation, and finally reconciliation between Catholics and the Crown. Today, in churches the length of the island, Catholics earnestly offer up prayers for “Charles, Our King” and sing “God Save the King” with as much fervor as any other subjects. It has been a period of intellectual revival and flourishing: the works of Belloc, Chesterton, Waugh, Newman, and Tolkien are beloved; there are thriving Catholic communities across the country; and by some measures, more Catholics attend Sunday services than their Anglican counterparts, despite the number of baptized Catholics being much smaller than the number of baptized Anglicans. All of this is welcome.

And yet, as I read the history of Chertsey Abbey in this pleasantly bound little volume, my mood soured at times. Because there is no forgetting that it was a burning shame what Henry did to the Church in his country. It is a shame that the Body of Christ was ruptured. It is a shame that so many Catholics suffered so greatly to practice a faith that had endured for hundreds of years before the Crown’s split from Rome. It is a tragedy that nothing remains standing of Chertsey Abbey except a small pile of stones.