Bayham Abbey

Founded over 800 years ago, Bayham Abbey was home to a community of Premonstratensian canons – ordained priests who lived according to a strict monastic rule. It was dissolved on the orders of Cardinal Wolsey in 1525 and the buildings were left to decay. In 1714 Sir John Pratt, later Lord Chief Justice of England, bought the Bayham estate, and he and his successors retained the ruined abbey as a fashionable landscape feature for their country retreat.

Today, Bayham is the best surviving example of a Premonstratensian abbey in England, and its impressive ruins show how life evolved at the monastery over 300 years.