The monastery born on a battlefield

Joanna Moorhead
Gatehouse Exhibition
Battle Abbey, Sussex

It is a sunny afternoon, and I am standing in a green, flower-strewn field in a sleepy corner of southern England.  Behind me is what is left of the vast Benedictine monastery that stood here for hundreds of years, dominating in equal measure the local landscape and the local economy: in its heyday, its church was almost a carbon copy of Westminster Abbey, and not much smaller.

Yet ask most people about this place, and the last thing they would mention would be the monks or the monastery. Because this is Battle, scene of perhaps the best-known event in British history, that far-from-sleepy day in October 1066 when a French duke, with the Pope’s blessing, took the crown of England from Harold Godwinson.