Five hundred years of monks

The tithe barn, church and Abbey Farm. Photo: John Stephen, geograph, CC BY-SA 2.0.

For five hundred years Abbotsbury was a monastery with a village attached, rather than the other way round. The Benedictines farmed the land. They ran the market, first held on Market Street in 1271, which carried on as St Peter's Fair into the last century. They kept the fishery on the Fleet, and from 1393 at the latest they kept the swannery, since swans were food for the abbot's table and the monks ran the colony as a farm. The 1300s were hard years. The Black Death took villagers and an abbot. Raiders from the sea made the coast unsafe, which is one reason the pilgrims' chapel of St Catherine went up on the hill and the church of St Nicholas was rebuilt in stone. In the 1400s the monks built the great tithe barn to hold the rents that were paid in grain. It is 272 feet long and 31 wide, with 23 bays, the largest thatched tithe barn in the world, and it is still standing. On 12 March 1539 Abbot Roger Roddon surrendered the house to Henry VIII's commissioners. One of them, Sir Giles Strangways, bought the lot, abbey, manors, mills and swannery, for £1,906 10s, which is about £1.6 million in today's money. His descendants, the Fox-Strangways, Earls of Ilchester, own most of it still.