Malmesbury Abbey

Stand for a moment in the south porch and look up. The stone is honey-coloured and soft, worn smooth in places by nine centuries of weather and hands. Bands of carved figures curve over the doorway, one ring inside another, like the layers of an onion cut in half. Some faces are crisp. Others have melted almost to nothing. The air is cool here, even on a warm day, and the sound of the town fades as you step inside the shelter of the arch.

You are standing at the threshold of one of the oldest religious sites in England. What you see today is only a part of a much larger building. It is a fragment, but a powerful one. The great nave still serves as the parish church of this small Wiltshire hilltop town. Around it, broken arches and empty spaces mark where the rest of the abbey once stood.

The story begins long before this stone was cut. In the seventh century, an Irish monk named Maildubh is said to have settled here and taught a small circle of pupils. One of those pupils was Aldhelm. He became abbot, and later a bishop, and he was one of the great scholars of Anglo-Saxon England. He wrote in elaborate Latin, and tradition says he also sang songs in English on the town bridge to draw people towards his sermons.

Under Aldhelm and those who followed him, the monastery grew in learning and in wealth. Kings paid attention to it. The most famous was Æthelstan, the grandson of Alfred the Great. He is often called the first king of all England, because he brought the separate English kingdoms under one rule. When he died in 939, he was buried here at Malmesbury, not at Winchester, where many of his family lay.

Inside the church, you will find a tomb with a carved stone figure of a king lying on top. Here is a detail many visitors miss. The tomb is much later than Æthelstan himself, and his remains are not inside it. The exact place of his burial was lost long ago. The tomb is a memorial, made centuries after his death, to honour a king the town never forgot.

Now for the story people love most. In the early eleventh century, a monk named Eilmer decided he wanted to fly. According to the account written down about a century later, he fixed wings to his hands and feet and jumped from a high tower of the abbey. He glided some distance — the record says more than two hundred metres — before he crashed and broke both his legs. He walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

The man who recorded that story was William of Malmesbury. He was a monk and librarian here in the twelfth century, and he is one of the most important historians of medieval England. He wrote histories of the English kings and bishops, and he travelled to other monasteries to read their books. Much of what we know about Anglo-Saxon England comes through his careful work, done in a library that stood somewhere near where you are now.

The building around you dates mostly from William's own century. It is Norman Romanesque architecture, the style that arrived with the Norman conquerors. Look at the round arches, the thick walls and the heavy, solid columns. The style feels strong and steady rather than light. Later builders added pointed windows and a higher roof, so the church shows two different periods sitting one on top of the other.

Go back to the south porch and look more closely. The carved bands show scenes from the Bible, from the creation of the world through to the life of Christ. Inside the porch, on each side wall, sit large carved figures of the apostles, six on each side. Above them, an angel flies flat across the stone. Many experts regard this porch as one of the finest pieces of Romanesque sculpture in Britain.

The abbey once stood much taller than it does now. It had a central tower with a spire, which some accounts say was higher than the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. That spire fell around the end of the fifteenth century, and it brought down part of the church with it. Later, a tower at the west end collapsed too. Walk outside and you can still see the ragged edges where stone once continued.

In 1539, King Henry the Eighth closed the monasteries of England, and the monks of Malmesbury were sent away. A wealthy local cloth merchant, William Stumpe, bought the buildings. For a time, he filled them with looms, and weavers worked where monks had prayed. Then he gave the nave to the townspeople as their parish church. That gift is the reason this part of the abbey survived when so many others became ruins.

Before you leave, walk through the churchyard. Look for the gravestone of Hannah Twynnoy, a young woman who died in the early eighteenth century. Her stone records that she was killed by a tiger. The animal had escaped from a travelling show that was visiting the town. She is thought to be the first person in Britain killed by a tiger. Inside the church, a stained glass window remembers Eilmer, holding his wings.

Stand now and look back at the porch, the broken arches, and the weathered stone. Above you, the sky fills the space where the spire once rose. Monks, kings, a flying man and a historian all knew this hilltop. As you walk down towards the market cross, listen to the bells, and notice how the town still gathers around its old abbey, as it has for well over a thousand years.