Bayham Abbey is in East Sussex - or Kent - depending on where you look for your information in the internet. Sited right on the county boundary the Abbey once featured a 'Kent' gate and a 'Sussex' gate although only the Kent gate survives today. The Ordnance Survey map places the Abbey just inside East Sussex.
Now part of a set:
www.flickr.com/photos/barryslemmings/sets/72157605827454105/
Bayham was built by Premonstratensian monks (from Prémont in France) and there were eventually 30 such houses in England with one in Wales and a few on the Scottish borders. Not all prospered and it seems Bayham was a 'twinning' of two failed monasteries - one at Otham in Sussex and the other at Brockley in Kent. A move to Bayham had been considered in 1205 but they were probably at Bayham by 1208 and certainly by 1211.
St Richard of Chichester stayed at Bayham during the 13th century and his former bed was said to have miraculous powers. The abbey survived the 15th century but started to lose chantry endowments and may also have suffered because it was nominally 'foreign' although Abbots no longer attended general chapters in France and were probably not paying the mother house either. While most monasteries were suppressed around 1536-37, Bayham was singled out in 1525 by Cardinal Wolsey along with a number of supposedly 'unworkable' monasteries to benefit his proposed colleges. Bayham's Abbot was bought off with another abbacy and the rest (including the canons) were effectively made homeless. A riot followed in which the buildings were re-occupied and a new abbot was elected. Wolsey cracked down and the ring leaders were imprisoned.
After Wolsey fell from grace the site came under Henry VIII and was leased to various royal favourites. Queen Elizabeth I sold it and it passed through various hands, eventually reaching the Pratt family in the 18th century who became Earls of Camden and Viscounts of Bayham. One of these built the present villa/Dower House in the grounds which is regarded as a pioneer building in the pre-Romantic Gothic movement. It was admired by Horace Walpole in 1752.
The ruins of the Abbey were damaged on the advice of landscape gardener Humphrey Repton but the current Dower House remained the principal home of the family until the much larger house was built about half a mile away on a neighbouring hill in the 1870s. The Kent gate and the main ruins were retained as follies but much material was robbed out for building elsewhere probably including the Dower House itself. At some stage part of the Abbey outbuildings were adapted into an Orangery.
Bayham Abbey is built from the local sandstone of the Ashdown or Tunbridge Wells beds. This varies in colour from amber to brown but is hard wearing and retains much medieval detail which would have been lost on a limestone building. In strong sunlight the ruins seem to glow.
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