FAWLEY COURT.
Sweeping round the eastern side of the Berkshire slopes the Thames is checked by Hambledon Lock and its islands—well known to fishermen, the reach above being noted for pike—by Aston Ferry, where the river begins to strike out into the more open part of the valley, by Culham Court and the islands below, till it approaches a place well known to the pleasure-seekers of the present day as a sort of half-way house between Henley and Marlow, and as the fittest site for a picnic.
Pleasantly situated on the level meadows in the valley on the Berkshire side, and backed by the wooded uplands which are now some little distance from the river, is Medmenham Abbey, a place of more note since its suppression than in earlier times. The convent was founded not long after the Norman Conquest, when the owner of the manor bestowed it on the Abbey of Woburn, in Buckinghamshire, which he had recently founded, for the endowment of a separate but subsidiary house. Medmenham does not appear ever to have become wealthy, and never made any figure in history, except that the abbot was epistolar of the Order of the Garter, a distinction which one would not have anticipated for a place so humble. The report of the Commissioners at the time of the suppression of the monasteries is curiously negative. It had at that time only two monks, “Servants none—Wood none—Debts none—Bells, &c., worth 2l. 1s. 8d. The house wholly in ruins, and the value of the moveable goods only 1l. 3s. 8d.” A poor piece of plunder, certainly.
ASTON FERRY.
As this statement would lead us to suppose, not much of the original conventual buildings now remain. Even of those parts which bear an ancient aspect, some are only imitations of the last century, when Medmenham enjoyed a certain amount of celebrity. At that time the abbey, which after the suppression of the monasteries had been converted into a dwelling-house, was the property of Francis Dashwood, Lord le Despencer. He determined to found a society, which was called after his first name—the Franciscan Order. It was, however, anything but an Order of Poverty. The number was twelve, in imitation of a band to which these men were the most opposite possible, for the old Latin lines—
“Exue Franciscum tunicâ laceroque cucullo
Qui Franciscus erat, jam tibi Christus erit”