Surviving the dissolution: the Syon Community at Denham, 1539-50

Abstract

When England’s only Bridgettine monastic community was dispersed after the suppression of Syon Abbey in late 1539, various groups of religious, both male and female, sought to continue their regular life in small household-based secular communities that eventually united to form the restored Syon Abbey under Mary Tudor’s patronage in 1556. The most important of these households was that of the former abbess, Agnes Jordan, which established itself at ‘Southlands’ near Denham in Buckinghamshire very soon after the dissolution. It was this group of religious that later went into exile on the continent in 1550 and ultimately formed the nucleus of the Marian refoundation. Little is known, however, about the day-to-day life of this household or how it managed to perpetuate the distinctive lifestyle and liturgy of the English Bridgettines in its decade of quiet solitude at Denham. New evidence will be used in this paper to suggest that an informal but recognisably monastic Bridgettine community existed at Denham under the leadership of Agnes Jordan (1540-46) and Katherine Palmer (1546-50) before its removal to the Low Countries in 1550. This small community seems to have observed as far as possible the basic precepts of the Bridgettine Regula Salvatoris and was thus able to preserve the pre-Reformation communal identity and monastic traditions of Syon Abbey.