of Netley, Hound, Sotteshall [Satchell] and Sholing’, Henry III’s patronage gave them full authority to impose their Christian order on the land.
It may have been suitably ‘horrible’ as a site, but there were also good economic reasons for the monks’ choice of Netley. Here were lush pastures for their sheep and cattle, fertile land for their crops, and plentiful fish and oysters in Southampton Water, supplemented by the abbey’s own freshwater stewponds. A grange farm was set up, along with a lodge to receive lepers barred from entering Southampton – an isolation ward in which the afflicted could be tended by novice monks in an already isolated site. Thus did the Cistercians reinvent the land in their own image – the image, by association and intent, of God.
The result was a self-sufficient community, maintaining its distance while continuing Christ’s mission in caring for the sick. Its proximity to water was an important spiritual aspect: water held traditional healing powers for the body and the soul, and Netley’s abbey would provide for both. And just as their new settlement sought to express Christ’s message, so the monks emulated their Saviour’s simplicity. They wore white habits and black scapulas without shirts underneath, slept on straw beds, rose at midnight to pray and remained silent for most of their day; they ate no meat unless in sickness, and transgression could result in solitary confinement or flogging. Such a regime was more like that of a prison, a medieval Spike Island, but their ordered lives and monastic traditions set the precedent for the industrialised society to come, just as their beliefs determined the order of life around them.
Bound by their vow of silence, protected by royal patronage and geographically removed from the sometimes dangerous nearby port (though trading with it in wool and other produce), the abbey’s monks could remain secure in their wordless isolation, as though their own castle walls, gothic rationality and implicit faith could keep out the barbarian world. They escaped the bloody raids of the 1330s, protected by their religious status and French origins, although not immune to the prevailing sense of instability as the taxation returns for February 1341 noted, being short of ‘8s of their usual value as a good part of the corn land lies left fallow through dread of foreign invasion and the marauding of the king’s sailors’. But then came an invasion no one could ignore.
According to the contemporary historian Henry Knighton of Leicester, the bubonic plague of 1348 entered England through Southampton, via fleas carried on the backs of rats and men up the estuary, injecting the country with its terrible bacillus. Other ports would lay claim to this dubious honour, but a later historian noted that ‘the town suffered much from a destructive pestilence which, beginning in China, had swept over the face of the whole discovered globe, and, entering into this island, spent its first fury in this neighbourhood’. The plague would kill half of Southampton’s population, while upriver at Winchester the townspeople were persuaded to parade around the marketplace reciting the seven penitential psalms three times a week; all to no avail as half its populace too would perish.
As Pasteurella pestis infected the rest of Britain with its flesh-corrupting buboes and noisome stench, culling three million – half the population – Netley’s Cistercians lived on in their lonely place. Around them England was pulled down by the calamity; fields were left untended, entire villages died. The plague was the hell of medieval imagining come to life, an evil miasma that lurked in the air itself, and in turn culture became infected with mortality, disease and decay. It was the plague that gave gothic its darkness: the images of St John’s Apocalypse, memento mori, and most vividly the Dance of Death, a skeleton leading bishops, kings, merchants and beggars alike to their graves in a danse macabre prompted by the shattered nervous systems of the disease’s victims.
Even Netley’s institutional self-sufficiency could not resist the inevitable change – not least the decline in lay-brothers, either from mortality or desertion, attracted by better working conditions to a world in which labour was at a premium. As the devils of disease punished the wicked, the halt in civilisation’s progress became manifest in its buildings. Before the epidemic, gothic had begun to develop a decadent enflorescence of ornate foliage and lascivious curves. The plague curtailed such extravagance (not least by decimating the workforce). It was God’s retribution for Man’s decadence – a moral decay which also appeared to have afflicted Netley, succeeding where the bubonic bacillus had failed. Society became more materialistic and more sceptical, paradoxes which made the religious orders prey both to apostasy and their own sensuality. By the end of the fifteenth century, Pope Sixtus IV had relaxed the rules governing closed orders, and the populace now began to turn against its white-robed neighbours, accusing them of laxity of observance and immorality. When Henry VIII began his move towards reformation, his supporters agreed that such orders had become corrupted by their own privilege.
Yet Netley was hardly a wealthy estate. By 1535 the population of monks had fallen to just seven, with thirty-two staff, £43 worth of plate and jewels, and an annual income of just £100. Establishments of its size were easy targets for suppression – especially by those who might stand to gain from the release of their land and resources – and the 1536 act of Parliament which began the process justified itself ‘forasmuch as manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living is daily used and committed amongst the little and small abbeys, priories and other religious houses of monks, canons and nuns …’
All around England statues and stained glass were smashed and destroyed, and in 1536 the wreckers came to Netley. The abbey’s lucent wonder was demolished by the sons of those who had built it, and with its dissolution, the Cistercians’ lonely place became an empty ruin.
The legend of tunnels running from underneath our school to Netley was irresistible. Ignoring its improbabilities, we crept into the school cellars and in the cobwebby gloom imagined a journey to the centre of the earth, or at least to the ruined abbey, where a workman by the name of Slown was said to have died of fright when he was sent down such a tunnel, his last words being, ‘Block it up! In the name of God!’ Netley bred these myths: the abbot’s treasure trove was said to lay buried in the grounds after the monks’ flight from the Dissolution, jealously guarded by his ghost.
Peter actually lived next to the abbey. I’d met him in my first year at St Mary’s, when he seemed a glamorous figure, with his sophisticated manner, anarchic humour and jet-set air (he had been to New York); he brought out the aspirational in me. Peter lived with his parents in a detached house next to the abbey ruins, and claimed it had been built on the monks’ graveyard, pointing out, as proof, the bumps in the lawn. That was a scary enough story, but the unmade driveway to his house passed the abbey itself, thrilling on moonlit nights with its great broken walls and gothic arches rising out of the trees. In their fantastic ruins you could reinvent yourself as any romantic figure of the past.
For a boy from Sholing, this gothic vision was captivating; the abbey seemed able not only to conjure up the past, but to invite the creation of a new identity – just as the ruins had reinvented themselves.
In 1540 Henry VIII had granted Netley, its buildings and lands – including Sholing – as a reward to his courtier, Sir William Paulet, for good service. To the outspoken William Cobbett, however, this was less good service than political manoeuvring quite equal to the corruption of which the abbey’s former owners had been accused. Paulet, later first Marquis of Winchester, was a nationally important figure: royal minister, Master of the King’s Wards, Comptroller of the Household, Lord Treasurer and sheriff of Hampshire; his mansion at Basing was one of the largest private houses in England. He was also ‘a man the most famous in the whole world for sycophancy, time-serving, and for all those qualities which usually distinguish the favourites of kings like the wife-killer’, said Cobbett.
With the deterioration of relations with France, and Henry VIII’s determination to pursue a glorious war, the King ordered the fortification of Southampton Water. In return for undertaking to build twelve castles along the Solent, Paulet was given certain manors and lands – including those of Netley Abbey. It was a shrewd piece of business. The dissolution of the monasteries freed up valuable building material, and the waterside abbeys of Quarr, Beaulieu and Netley were convenient to plunder and recycle as Henry’s new castles at Yarmouth, Cowes and Hurst. Yet by 1542 – just three years before an invading French fleet of 200 ships would mass off the Isle of Wight – Netley had acquired only