ABSTRACT
The account of the work at Bermondsey1 is much facilitated by the existence of papers on the abbey by Dr. Rose Graham and Mr. A. R. Martin,2 the former dealing with the history, the latter setting out what is known from the records of the topography and of the architectural development of the buildings. As to the first, Dr. Graham gave good reason for viewing with distrust
the monastic Annals, which, compiled as she thought about 1433, purport to give the history of the monastery from its foundation in the late eleventh century. It seems probable that a London citizen, one Alwyn Child, was the first benefactor when he gave rents in the City of London to the monks of La Charit6-sur-Loire, the great Cluniac foundation which was the motherhouse of several other houses in England besides Bermondsey. This, accord ing to the Annals, took place in 1082. On the other hand, the actual site for the monastery did not become available until in 1089 William Rufus gave to La Charite the Manor of Bermondsey; and here the monks took possession of the ‘nova et pulchra ecclesia’, the new and handsome church which is referred to in the Domesday Survey. Once established the monastery enjoyed much favour. It had wealthy
benefactors and was a place of resort both for pilgrims and for important travellers, ecclesiastical and lay alike. There is evidence also from material remains, where records fail, of building activity at various times in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The main and almost the only source of information on the structural
features and layout of the abbey is a group of three manuscript volumes in
the British Museum, compiled by John Chessil Buckler between 1808 and 1820. As Mr. Martin records, the most important of these for topographi cal purposes is the volume of plans and drawings, which not only constitute a painstaking pictorial record of the site made only a few years before it was submerged in modern development but also incorporate many measure ments which have the appearance of being quite precise. As Mr. Martin rightly says, without Buckler’s records it would be im
possible to establish even the site of the church. With them the outlines of the monastic property can be fixed: the main west gate was at the junction of Abbey Street with Bermondsey Street; the church itself straddled the intersection of what are now Tower Bridge Road and Abbey Street, with the claustral and other buildings to the south. When Buckler made his record the main buildings on the site (apart from the original west gate-house) were those of the mansion built in the 1 540’s by Sir Thomas Pope. Pope used the south wall of the church as the basis for the north walls of his main buildings, the area of the church itself remaining as open gardens. On the north the gardens were delimited by a brick wall, evidently on the site of the north wall of the church, a feature of which was a rectangular bay projecting 15 feet northwards from the main line, its western return about 340 feet in from the outer gate. The siting of this wall is of crucial importance for the determination of the site: it is the one wall which Buckler accurately records with stated measurements on his tracing of the 25-inch plan and to it many of his other measurements are ultimately related. As a result of the bombing the buildings on the north side of Abbey
Street between Tower Bridge Road on the west and Riley Street on the east had been almost completely destroyed: all that remained was a small group of buildings on the north-west corner of the site. Incorporated in these buildings and forming part of the south wall of the block was a wall of very mixed masonry of ‘early’ appearance which extended a little way eastwards from the buildings. Excavation subsequently showed that this wall, which elsewhere consisted largely of brick, was in fact relatively late, but was built on top of an older wall which had originally been equipped with buttresses on its north side (Plate 102). The buttresses had been removed, only their foundations remaining. When Buckler’s wall came to be plotted according to his measurements it was found to coincide exactly with the line of the
old wall just described; and there can be no doubt that they are one and the same (Fig. 51). The excavation of the bombed area was handicapped as always by
modern obstructions and disturbance, the chief being a series of bomb shelters along the Abbey Street frontage. The deposits were everywhere mixed to depths of 6 feet and more below the surface and nowhere had original floor-levels survived. The undisturbed natural ground consisted of a loamy sand, usually of a brownish colour, overlying gravel; the surface of the sand was at about 6 feet, that of the gravel at about 9 feet. Very little of the faced stonework of the walls had survived. Chalk foundations re mained in some places, their bases resting on the gravel (Plate 10 1) : else where walls could be followed by their robber trenches, which normally contained a filling of loose mortar with small chalk rubble. Apart from the usual post-mediaeval features, cesspits, wells and the
like, five structural elements were recognisable. First towards the north eastern part of the area explored there was a series of foundations and robber trenches, very incompletely seen, which were so incorporated with the other remains as to leave no doubt that they were earlier than anything else on the site. The meaning of these features is not at all clear. They do not fit into the plan of the church. They are not recognisable as part of the pre monastic church whose existence seems to be implied in the Domesday statement (above, p. 210). Nor, on the authority of Mr. H. M . Colvin, is there any reason for thinking that there would have been buildings of importance in the manor when the royal gift was made to La Charitd in 1098. The second group of structures related to the first, Norman, phase of the
church. The area involved extended eastwards from the new (1963) frontage of Tower Bridge Road for about n o feet, northwards for a maximum of 40 feet (except for an extension at the western end). On the basis of the measurements recorded by Buckler this would have represented rather less than half, the northern half, of the full width of the church. The excavation revealed that the area encompassed lengthwise the eastern part of the church from the eastern chapels to the main transept; but some part of the transept lies under Tower Bridge Street. It is not possible here to discuss at length every feature revealed by this
excavation and a number of problems remain-and will remain-unsolved.
