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Tintern Abbey ( ) is a ruined medieval abbey situated adjacent to the village of Tintern in Monmouthshire, on the Welsh bank of the River Wye, which at this location forms the border between Monmouthshire in Wales and Gloucestershire in England. Founded on 9 May 1131 by Walter de Clare, Lord of Chepstow, it was the first Cistercian foundation in Wales, and only the second in Britain (after Waverley Abbey).
The abbey fell into ruin after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century. Its remains have been celebrated in poetry and painting from the 18th century onwards. In 1984, Cadw took over responsibility for managing the site. Tintern Abbey is visited by approximately 70,000 people every year.
William Giffard, Bishop of Winchester introduced the first colony of Cistercian monks to England at Waverley Abbey, Surrey, in 1128. His first cousin, Walter de Clare, of the powerful family of De Clare, established the second Cistercian house in Britain, and the first in Wales, at Tintern in 1131. The Tintern monks came from a daughter house of Cîteaux, L'Aumône Abbey, in the diocese of Chartres in France. In time, Tintern established two daughter houses, Kingswood Abbey in Gloucestershire (1139) and Tintern Parva, west of Wexford in southeast Ireland (1203).
It is this great Decorated Gothic abbey church that can be seen today, representing the architectural developments of its period; it has a cruciform plan with an aisled nave, two chapels in each transept, and a square-ended aisled chancel. The abbey is built of Old Red Sandstone, with colours varying from purple to buff and grey. Its total length from east to west is 228 feet, while the transept is 150 feet in length.
King Edward II stayed at Tintern for two nights in 1326. When the Black Death swept the country in 1349, it became impossible to attract new recruits for the ; during this period, the granges were more likely to be Tenant farmer than worked by lay brothers, evidence of Tintern's labour shortage. In the early 15th century, Tintern was short of money, due in part to the effects of the Welsh uprising under Owain Glyndŵr against the English kings, when abbey properties were destroyed by the Welsh. The closest battle to Tintern Abbey was at Craig-y-dorth near Monmouth, between Trellech and Mitchel Troy.
Not all visitors to the Abbey ruins were shocked by the intrusion of industry, however. Joseph Cottle and Robert Southey set out to view the ironworks at midnight on their 1795 tour,Joseph Cottle, Early Recollections pp.50–1 while others painted or sketched them during the following years.See the 1798 print of "Iron Mills, A View near Tintern Abbey" belonging to Foundries the National Library of Wales and James Ward’s 1807 sketch of "Mr Thompson’s Wire Mill, Tintern" at the Yale Center for British Art A 1799 print of the Abbey by Edward Dayes includes the boat landing near the ruins with the square-sailed local cargo vessel known as a trow drawn up there. On the bank is some of the encroaching housing, while in the background above are the cliffs of a lime quarry and smoke rising from the kiln. Though Philip James de Loutherbourg's 1805 painting of the ruins does not include the intrusive buildings commented on by others, it makes their inhabitants and animals a prominent feature. Even William Havell's panorama of the valley from the south pictures smoke rising in the distance (see Gallery), much as Wordsworth had noted five years before "wreathes of smoke sent up in silence from among the trees" in his description of the scene."Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey", lines 18–19
Among subsequent visitors was Francis Grose, who included the Abbey in his Antiquities of England and Wales, begun in 1772 and supplemented with more illustrations from 1783. In his description he noted how the ruins were being tidied for the benefit of tourists: "The fragments of its once sculptured roof, and other remains of its fallen decorations, are piled up with more regularity than taste on each side of the grand aisle." There they remained for the next century and more, as is evident from the watercolours of J. M. W. Turner (1794), the prints of Francis Calvert (1815) and the photographs of Roger Fenton (1858). Grose further complained that the site was too well tended and lacked "that gloomy solemnity so essential to religious ruins".Francis Grose, The Antiquities of England and Wal, London 1784, vol.3, p.168
Another visitor during the 1770s was the Rev. William Gilpin, who later published a record of his tour in Observations on the River Wye (1782), Gilpin, William, 1724–1804: Observations on the river Wye, and several parts of South Wales, &c: relative chiefly to picturesque beauty: made in the summer of the year 1770 Archived online Accessed 28 September 2017 devoting several pages to the Abbey as well as including his own sketches of both a near and a far view of the ruins. Though he too noted the same points as had Grose, and despite also the presence of the impoverished residents and their desolate dwellings, he found the Abbey nevertheless "a very inchanting piece of ruin". Gilpin's book helped increase the popularity of the already established Wye tour and gave travellers the aesthetic tools by which to interpret their experience. It also encouraged "its associated activities of amateur sketching and painting" and the writing of other travel journals of such tours. Initially Gilpin's book was associated with his theory of the Picturesque, but later some of this was modified by another editor so that, as Thomas Dudley Fosbroke’s Gilpin on the Wye (1818), the account of the tour could function as the standard guidebook for much of the new century.Stephen Copley, "Tourists, Tintern Abbey and the Picturesque", in Imprints & Re-visions: The Making of the Literary Text, 1759–1818, Gunter Narr Verlag, 1996, pp.61–2
Meanwhile, other more focussed works aimed at the tourist were available by now. They included Charles Heath’s Descriptive Accounts of Tintern Abbey, first published in 1793, which was sold at the Abbey itself and in nearby towns. The 1798 edition at Google Books This grew into an evolving project that ran through eleven editions until 1828 and, as well as keeping abreast of the latest travel information, was also a collection of historical and literary materials descriptive of the building. Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland , Palgrave Macmillan 2012; C.S.Matheson, Ch.3 "'Ancient and Present', Charles Heath of Monmouth", pp.50–67 Later there appeared Taylor's Illustrated Guide to the Banks of the Wye, published from Chepstow in 1854 and often reprinted. The work of local bookseller Robert Taylor, it was aimed at arriving tourists and also available eventually at the Abbey. Available at Google Books Much the same information as in that work appeared later as the 8-page digest, An Hour at Tintern Abbey (1870, 1891), by John Taylor. Available at Google Books
Until the early 19th century, the local roads were rough and dangerous and the easiest access to the site was by boat. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, while trying to reach Tintern from Chepstow on a tour with friends in 1795, almost rode his horse over the edge of a quarry when they became lost in the dark.Joseph Cottle, Early recollections: chiefly relating to the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, London 1837, pp.43–50 It was not until 1829 that the new Wye Valley turnpike was completed, cutting through the abbey precinct.Cadw, Lower Wye Valley In 1876 the Wye Valley Railway opened a station for Tintern. Although the line itself crossed the river before reaching the village, a branch was built from it to the wireworks, obstructing the view of the Abbey on the road approach from the north.
Earlier in the century, the light effects made possible by transparencies (a forerunner of the modern photographic negative) had been deployed to underline such aspects of the picturesque. Among those described in the novel Mansfield Park (1814) as decorating its heroine’s sitting room, one was of Tintern Abbey. Jane Austen: "Mansfield Park" Standard novels edition, London 1833, p.135 Accessed 7 October 2017 The function of the transparencies was to reproduce light effects, such as “fire light, moon light, and other glowing illusions”, created by painting areas of colour on the back of a commercial engraving and adding varnish to make specific areas translucent when suspended in front of a light source. Graphic Arts Since the Abbey was one of the buildings recommended for viewing by moonlight, it is possible that this was the subject of the one in Fanny's room. In fact, a tinted print of the period such as those used for creating transparencies already existed in "Ibbetson's Picturesque Guide to Bath, Bristol &c", in which the full moon is featured as seen through an arch of the east wing. The work of John Hassell, dated 1797
Different light effects appear in the work of other painters, such as the sunsets by Samuel Palmer Samuel Palmer – "Tintern Abbey at Sunset" at Wikimedia Accessed 7 October 2017 and Benjamin Williams Leader, and the colour study by Turner in which the distant building appears as a "dark shape at the centre"Matthew Imms, "Tintern Abbey from the River Wye c.1828 by Joseph Mallord William Turner", catalogue entry, March 2013, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2013 Accessed 7 October 2017 beneath slanting sunlight (see Gallery).
One set of verses hails the Abbey's survival, despite Henry VIII's dissolution, "Where thou in gothic grandeur reign’st alone". The phrase "gothic grandeur" derives from John Cunningham’s "An elegy on a pile of ruins”" (1761), an excerpt from which was published by Grose at the end of his description of Tintern Abbey. At that period the adjective was used as a synonym for "mediaeval"Alfred E. Longueil, "The Word "Gothic" in Eighteenth Century Criticism", Modern Language Review 38.8 (1923), pp.453–60 and was so applied by Grose when describing the Abbey as being "of that stile of architecture called gothic".Francis Grose, The antiquities of England and Wales vol.3, pp.167–8 Cunningham's poem was a melancholy contemplation of the ravages of time that spoke in general terms without naming a specific building. But the verses on the print are more positive in feeling; in celebrating the Abbey's historical persistence, they do not see ruin as necessarily a cause for regret. The scenes below which the verses appear are also quite different from each other. Calvert's view is across the river from the opposite bank of the Wye, National Library of Wales while the Rock print is close up to the ruins with the river in the background. Rare Old Prints, Publisher's Ref: 1105
Tintern is not specifically named in the verses mentioned above, although it is in two other sets and their poetic form overall is consistent: paired quatrains with pentameter lines rhymed alternately. One set begins "Yes, sacred Tintern, since thy earliest age," and King Henry is again represented as being foiled in his intention, but this time by no "earthly king". The Abbey's roof is now "of Heaven’s all glorious blue" and its pillars "foliaged… in vivid hue". Here Calvert's interior view looks past the ivy-grown pillars to the south window. National Library of Wales The Rock view that these lines accompany is of that same window, surrounded by ivy and viewed from the exterior. Rare Old Prints, Publisher's Ref: 1106 Another set of verses begins "Thee! venerable Tintern, thee I hail", and celebrates the Abbey's setting. An appeal to Classical standards of beauty is made by calling the Wye by its Latin name of Vaga and referring to the serenading nightingale as Philomel. Naturally the river features in both prints, but where Calvert's is the south-east view from the high ground behind the Abbey, with the Wye flowing past it to the right, National Library of Wales the Rock view is from across the river, looking up to the high ground. Rare Old Prints, Publisher's Ref: 1064
The remaining print by Calvert is another view of the interior in which a small figure in the foreground points down to a heap of masonry there, National Library of Wales while the Rock print corresponds to Calvert's view of the south window. Rare Old Prints, Publisher's Ref: 1065 The accompanying stanzas deal with the transient nature of fame. Beginning “Proud man! Stop here, survey yon fallen stone”, their emotional tone is a melancholy at odds with the buoyant message of the other verses. It is uncertain whether all eight stanzas were originally from the same poem on the subject of the Abbey and what the relationship was between poet and artist.
J. M. W. Turner had been accompanying his work with poetical extracts from 1798,Elizabeth E. Barker, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, 2004 but it was not a widespread practice. However, the appearance of the title A Series of Sonnets Written Expressly to Accompany Some Recently-Published Views of Tintern Abbey, dating from 1816, the year after the appearance of Calvert's portfolio, suggests another contemporary marriage between literary and artistic responses to the ruins. Edward Procter, 2019 But while the main focus in Calvert's Four Coloured Engravings is the pictures, in a later hybrid work combining verse and illustration it is the text. Louisa Anne Meredith’s "Tintern Abbey in four sonnets" appeared in the 1835 volume of her Poems, prefaced by the reproduction of the author's own sketch of the ivy-covered north transept. This supplements in particular the description in the third sonnet:
The Abbey also featured in poems arising from the Wye tour, such as the already mentioned account of his voyage by Rev. Sneyd Davies, in which the ruins are briefly reflected on at its end. It is that element of personal response that largely distinguishes such poems from verse documentaries of the sort written by Edward Davies and Edward Collins. For example, the gap between the ideal and the actual is what Thomas Warwick noted, looking upstream to the ruins of Tintern Abbey and downstream to those of Chepstow Castle, in a sonnet written at nearby Piercefield House.Thomas Warwick, "Sonnet 2" in Abelard to Eloisa: An Epistle, to which are prefixed Sonnets, London 1783, p.6 Edward Jerningham's short lyric, "Tintern Abbey", written in 1796, commented on the lamentable lesson of the past, appealing to Gilpin's observations as his point of reference. Edward Jerningham, "Tintern Abbey" in Poems and Plays, Vol.2, p.135 at Internet Archive Accessed 7 October 2017 Fosbroke's later adaptation of that work is likewise recommended as a supplement to Arthur St John's more voluminous description in the account of his own tour along the river in 1819, The Weft of the Wye.Arthur St John, The Weft of the Wye: A Poem, Descriptive of the Scenery of that River, London, 1826, pp.97–101; see also the note on p.140
Contemplation of the past reminded the Rev. Luke Booker of his personal mortality in an "Original sonnet composed on leaving Tintern Abbey and proceeding with a party of friends down the River Wye to Chepstow"; inspired by his journey, he hopes to sail as peacefully at death to the "eternal Ocean".Booker's sonnet appeared in Charles Heath’s guide to Tintern Abbey And Edmund Gardner (1752?–1798), with his own death imminent, similarly concluded in his "Sonnet Written in Tintern Abbey", that "Man’s but a temple of a shorter date". Edmund Gardner, "Sonnet written in Tintern Abbey" at Google Books; the sonnet originally appeared pseudonymously, accompanying a similarly moralising sonnet on the Severn in The European Magazine vol.30, p.119. Accessed 7 October 2017 William Wordsworth’s different reflections followed a tour on foot that he made along the river in 1798, although he does not actually mention the ruins in his "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey". Instead, he recalls an earlier visit five years before and comments on the beneficial internalisation of that memory."Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798", Online text at the Poetry Foundation Later Robert Bloomfield made his own tour of the area with friends, recording the experience in a journal and in his long poem, "The Banks of the Wye" (1811). However, since the timetable of the boat-trip downstream was constrained by the necessity of the tide, the Abbey was only given brief attention as one of many items on the way. The Remains of Robert Bloomfield, London 1824, "Journal of a Tour down the River Wye", Vol.2, pp.18–19 Robert Bloomfield: "The Banks of Wye": Poem Text II.65–88 Accessed 1 October 2017
Aspects of the building's past were treated at much greater length in two more poems. George Richards' ode, "Tintern Abbey; or the Wandering Minstrel", was probably written near the end of the 18th century. It opens with a description of the site as it used to be, seen from outside; then a minstrel arrives, celebrating the holy building in his song as a place of loving nurture, of grace and healing.David Fairer, Organising Poetry, the Coleridge Circle 1790–1798, OUP 2009, p.130 The other work, "The Legend of Tintern Abbey", is claimed as having been "written on the Banks of the Wye" by Edwin Paxton Hood, who quotes it in his historical work, Old England. Old England: historic pictures of life in old castles, forests, abbeys, and cities, London 1851, pp.141–4 An 11-stanza poem in rolling anapaest, it relates how Walter de Clare had murdered his wife and built the Abbey in penitence. Closing on an evocation of the ruins by moonlight, the work was later reprinted in successive editions of "Taylor's Illustrated Guide" over the following decades.
Louisa Anne Meredith used the occasion of her visit to reimagine the past in a series of linked sonnets that allowed her to pass backwards from the present-day remains, beautified by the mantling vegetation, to bygone scenes, "Calling them back to life from darkness and decay"."Tintern Abbey in four sonnets" in Poems, London 1835, pp.37–40 For Henrietta F. Vallé, "Seeing a lily of the valley blooming among the ruins of Tintern" was sufficient to mediate the pious sentiments of a former devotee there. As she noted, "it must ever awaken mental reflection to see beauty blossoming among decay". Autumnal leaves; or, Tints of memory and imagination, London 1837 (second edition), pp.36–8
But the Oxford Movement of the following decades forbade such a sympathetic response and made a new battleground of the ruins. "Tintern Abbey: a Poem" (1854) was, according to its author, Frederick Bolingbroke Ribbans (1800–1883), "occasioned by a smart retort given to certain Romish priests who expressed the hope of soon recovering their ecclesiastical tenure of it". He prefers to see the building in its present decay than return to the time of its flourishing, "when thou wast with falsehood fill’d". The Freemasons’ Monthly Magazine, May 1855, p.303 Martin Tupper too, in his sonnet "Tintern Abbey" (1858), exhorts his readers to "Look on these ruins in a spirit of praise", insofar as they represent "Emancipation for the Soul" from superstition.Denis G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England, Stanford University 1992, p.66
Only a few years earlier, in his 1840 sonnet on the Abbey, Richard Monckton Milnes had deplored the religious philistinism which had "wreckt this noble argosy of faith". He concluded, as had Louisa Anne Meredith's sonnets and the verses accompanying Calvert's prints, that the ruin's natural beautification signified divine intervention, "Masking with good that ill which cannot be undone".Richard Monckton Milnes: "Poetry for the People", "Tintern Abbey", p.87, Accessed 7 October 2017 In the wake of the Protestant backlash since then, Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley was constrained to allow, in the three sonnets he devoted to the Abbey, that after "Men cramped the truth" the building's subsequent ruin had followed as a judgment. However, its renewed, melodic blossoming now stands as a reproach to Tupper's brand of pietism too: "Man, fretful with the Bible on his knee,/ Has need of such sweet musicker as thee!" Book of Bristol Sonnets (1877): "Middle Age", "Old Age Coming On", "Tintern Abbey", pp.125, 126, 134
In the 20th century two American poets returned to Wordsworth's evocation of the landscape as the launching pad for their personal visions. John Gould Fletcher’s "Elegy on Tintern Abbey" answered the Romanticism poet's optimism with a denunciation of subsequent industrialisation and its ultimate outcome in the social and material destructiveness of World War I. Selected Poems of John Gould Fletcher, Farrar & Rinehart, 1938, "Elegy on Tintern Abbey", p.208-11 Following a visit some thirty years later, Allen Ginsberg took lysergic acid near there on 29 July 1967 and afterwards wrote his poem "Wales Visitation" as a result.Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century, Cambridge University 1991, pp.83–4Luke Walker, "Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Wales Visitation’ as a neo-Romantic response to Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’", Romanticism 19.2 (2013): 207–217 By way of "the silent thought of Wordsworth in eld Stillness" he beholds "clouds passing through skeleton arches of Tintern Abbey" and from that focus goes on to experience oneness with valleyed Wales.Alan Ginsberg, "Wales Visitation", The Beat Book: Writings from the Beat Generation (ed. Anne Waldman), Shambhala Publications 2007, pp.103–5
During the 20th century the genre switched to supernatural fiction, starting with "The Ghost of Tintern Abbey" (1901) by Mrs (Harriet Margaret Anne) Arthur Traherne, which is the means of discovering a murder. Literature (1901), p. 304) It was followed by "The Troubled Spirit of Tintern Abbey", a story privately printed in 1910 under the initials 'E. B.' which was later included in Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book (1936). There an Anglicanism cleric and his wife are on a cycling tour in the Wye valley and are contacted by a ghost from Purgatory who persuades them to have masses said for his soul.Joseph Azize, "A Tale of Purgatory and Masses for the Dead" Later came Henry Gardner's novella, "The Ghost of Tintern Abbey", in 1984. Waterstones
The more recent novel, Gordon Master's The Secrets of Tintern Abbey (2008), covers the building's mediaeval history as the author dramatises the turbulent 400 years of the Cistercian community up to the monastery's dissolution. Gordon Masters, The Secrets of Tintern Abbey: A Historical Novel, Wheatmark, 2009 Accessed 7 October 2017
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