From the North Foreland to Penzance

by Clive Holland

The monks escaped, however, owing to the refusal of the soldiers to carry out the King’s barbarous order. And at night the King dreamed that he was condemned at the Last Judgement to be scourged by the very monks he had intended to have slain. This dream—as did many similar ones at that time—made a great impression upon the King’s mind; and as an acknowledgement of the evil he had intended to do, he determined to found an Abbey for the accommodation of the monks of the Cistercian Order as a propitiatory act to the Almighty.

It was at Beaulieu, which name means “fair spot,” and indicates the loveliness of its situation, that he built an abbey set amid primeval forest trees, and washed by the meadow-bordered waters of the River Exe, which widens out into Beaulieu Creek. The privilege of sanctuary was conferred upon the Abbey by Pope Innocent IV about 1235, and on several occasions celebrated personages availed themselves of the protection that the Abbey was thus able to afford. Claiming sanctuary the Countess of Warwick, wife of the King Maker, took refuge here in April, 1471, after landing from France at Southampton hard by, and learning of the defeat and death of her husband at the Battle of Barnet. A few days before, too, to Beaulieu also came Margaret of Anjou, who also landed on English soil on the day of the Battle of Barnet, with reinforcements for her husband, Henry VI.

A few years later there hastened to Beaulieu a very different sanctuary seeker in the person of Perkin Warbeck, of ridiculous memory, the tool of Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy and the Yorkists, in flight before the forces of King Henry VII.

At the time of the suppression of the monasteries in 1539 to 1540 it is recorded that there were no less than thirty-two men, some with wives and families, living under the protection of the abbey walls.

After its dissolution as a religious foundation the Abbey and its lands experienced various vicissitudes; passing into the possession successively of one Thomas Wriothesley, afterwards created Earl of Southampton; then, by marriage, into that of Lord Montagu, the founder of Buckler’s Hard; and afterwards into the family of the Duke of Buccleuch, also by marriage; and lastly was settled in 1884 by the then Duke on his second son, who three years later became first Baron Montagu of Beaulieu.

The Abbey ruins are very fragmentary and much less extensive than is the case with many institutions of a similar character which were destroyed about the same time. Anciently the grounds had an area of more than a mile and a quarter, and the church—only a fragment of which now remains—then consisted of a lengthy nave, aisles, transepts with aisles, and apsed choir, with a lofty central tower crowning the whole. When the Abbey fell into the hands of the despoilers, much of the stone of which the church was built was taken away to Hurst and used to build the castle and fort at that place.

Strange as it may seem there was anciently a prosperous vineyard attached to the Abbey, and wine was made in considerable quantities by the monks. Tradition asserts that grapes have been gathered as late as the middle of the eighteenth century; but of the vineyard no trace now remains save the ruins of the old winepress still visible about eighty yards north of the church.

The seat of Lord Montagu, the Abbot’s Palace, is beautifully situated amid fine trees, and in close proximity to the Abbey ruins. Since it was converted into a private residence by Thomas Wriothesley, the first secular owner, it has undergone many periods of reconstruction, which have resulted in the present somewhat castle-like building.

After a day or two in Beaulieu River most yachtsmen will be inclined to agree with us that there are few more lovely spots, and if, instead of pushing up the river as far as the bend below Buckler’s Hard, one brings up snugly just off Exbury Hard, under shelter of the tree-clad point on the West bank, one need have little fear that any other craft will foul one, whether coming down or up the river, as the tide sets off to the east shore.

To get out of Beaulieu River is a more difficult matter than to get in. To attempt the feat except on the ebb is almost bound to end in disaster, for there are plenty of shoals, and mud abounds. The great thing is to get out on the very top of the ebb, and not cross the line from one boom to another on the same side. If these two points are observed, the westward flowing stream will carry one as far as is needed, and then one can stand away along the coast to another Hampshire creek, more frequented, though less beautiful than Beaulieu, which leads up to quaint, old-world Lymington, with its memories of the old yachting and yacht-building days of three or four decades ago.