# Buckfast Abbey

Benedictine abbey in Buckfast, Devon

Buckfastleigh, United Kingdom

Sacred place. 1001 CE – 1539 CE

## Story

• A Benedictine house was founded here in 1018, became Savignac and then Cistercian in the twelfth century, and was surrendered on 25 February 1539.
• French monks returned on 28 October 1882, and from January 1907 a handful of them rebuilt the church, consecrated on 25 August 1932.
• The medieval north gate, the abbot’s tower, and the guest hall stand among the later ranges on the River Dart.
• Boniface Natter drowned in the wreck of the Sirio on 4 August 1906, and Anscar Vonier died in December 1938 after the church was finished.
• A watching brief in February 2025 found only modern deposits by the guesthouse, and the monastery is still a living house of prayer.

## Visiting

The abbey church is open daily from 6:30am to 6:00pm, and it reopens later for evening worship. General visitors are not allowed to enter during services. Another notice says the church is open from 9:30 am to 4:30 pm Monday to Saturday, and from 11:30 am to 4:30 pm on Sunday. Admission to the church, the car park, and the gardens is free.
Car parks and gardens are open daily from 7:30am to 8:30pm. The Monastic Way exhibition has an entry fee of £2 a person, and children aged 11 and under are free. The exhibition opens at 10:00am, last admission is at 3:30pm, and it closes at 4:15pm. Shops are open from 10:00am to 4:30pm daily.
Only registered assistance dogs are allowed to enter the buildings. Other dogs are not allowed to enter the buildings and must stay on a short lead. Coaches must book in advance.

## History

Buckfast Abbey is a Benedictine monastery at Buckfast, near Buckfastleigh, in the valley of the River Dart. The church is dedicated to St Mary, and since 1960 the community has belonged to the English Benedictine Congregation. A count in 2020 found thirteen monks.

A first monastery is dated to 1018, in the reign of King Cnut, and it was small and poor. The founder is given as Aethelweard, also called Aylward, as King Cnut, or only as a local nobleman. Alwin attended the shire-moot at Exeter in about 1040 and is named as abbot in 1066.

The site of that first house is uncertain. A stone fragment from the guest hall may be Saxon, and a late Anglo-Saxon monastery has been suggested at Holy Trinity in Buckfastleigh. Excavation published in 1988 found no Saxon foundation on the present ground.

In 1136, or in one account in 1134, King Stephen gave Buckfast to the abbot of Savigny. The house became Cistercian in 1147 and was rebuilt in stone. Wool, seventeen manors, fisheries, and a market at Kingsbridge made it one of the richer abbeys of the south-west.

There may have been sixty choir monks and twice as many lay brothers, a body also reckoned at about 180. The Black Death killed two abbots and many monks, and some buildings collapsed. A later medieval recovery left the abbot’s tower and the guest hall.

On 25 February 1539 Abbot Gabriel Donne surrendered the abbey to Sir William Petre. Ten monks signed the deed and Donne was granted a pension of 120 pounds, while another count says twenty-two monks were still housed there. One and a half tons of precious metal reached the Tower from a campaign of forty houses, and one account assigns that whole weight to Buckfast alone.

Sir Thomas Denys, also written Dennys, stripped the buildings after the crown granted him the site. Samuel Berry bought the ruin in 1800, kept the tower and the undercroft, and built a castellated house. French Benedictines from La Pierre-qui-Vire arrived on 28 October 1882.

Frederick Walters revised his design once the twelfth-century foundations were uncovered. Boniface Natter was blessed as abbot in 1903 and drowned on 4 August 1906 when the steamship Sirio struck a reef off the Spanish coast. Anscar Vonier, saved from that wreck, was elected on 14 September 1906, and the foundation stone was laid in January 1907.

Never more than six monks worked on the church at one time. It was consecrated on 25 August 1932, the last tower stone was set on 24 July 1937, and the scaffolding was cleared in December 1938. Vonier died on 26 December 1938, either after seeing the finished church or, in another account, just before the last pinnacle was set.

A watercolour by Alfred Robert Quinton, about 1920, shows the tower still unfinished. Bruno Fehrenbacher then led the house through the Second World War, when staff and 100 pupils from a Plymouth college took refuge. A preparatory school ran from 1967 to 1994, and two former monks were later imprisoned for sexually abusing boys there.

David Charlesworth was first elected on 3 January 1992, again in 2009, and on 9 April 2021. Under the later abbots the choir was refounded, a new floor was laid, and an organ was installed in 2017. The millennium of the 1018 foundation was kept in 2018.

The church and the main block were listed on 10 January 1951. In February 2025 a watching brief beside the guesthouse found only modern deposits, a sherd of whiteware, and a clay-pipe stem. No world-heritage inscription is recorded for this abbey, and the church remains the working home of the monks who returned in 1882.

## Photographs

- [Church of St Mary (buckfast Abbey) — Necrothesp](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Buckfast_Abbey%2C_Buckfastleigh%2C_Devon_8.JPG)
- [Abejas Buckfast — MikePhobos](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Buckfast_bee.jpg)
- [Statue of Our Lady with Christ child, Buckfast Abbey, Devon — Madame.evangelista](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Our-lady-buckfast-abbey.JPG)
- [A Robin at Buckfast Abbey. After a pleasant stroll round Buckfast Abbey and gardens, a cup of coffee is called for - and of course if food is around a robin is — Neil Kennedy](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/A_Robin_at_Buckfast_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_206999.jpg)
- [Gatehouse, Buckfast Abbey The building, which includes the shop for what is one of the south west's biggest tourist attractions, was built in 1983-4, and forms — Derek Harper](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Gatehouse%2C_Buckfast_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_532560.jpg)
- [An undisturbed corner of Buckfast Abbey — Mick Lobb](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/An_undisturbed_corner_of_Buckfast_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1159763.jpg)
- [Sequoiadendron giganteum at Buckfast Abbey. Also known as the Giant Sequoia and Mammoth Tree, this is the species that reaches prodigious heights in the — Mick Lobb](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Sequoiadendron_giganteum_at_Buckfast_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1159747.jpg)
- [Apiary of Buckfast bees. — Humboldt55](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Scanbk0009.jpg)
- [004 Buckfast Abbey — Skin - ubx from Glasgow](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/004_Buckfast_Abbey_%285930470356%29.jpg)
- [022 Buckfast Abbey — Skin - ubx from Glasgow](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/022_Buckfast_Abbey_%285930474182%29.jpg)

## Sources

- [Boniface Natter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boniface_Natter) — Wikipedia
- [Buckfast History](https://www.buckfast.org.uk/buckfast-history/) — Buckfast Abbey
- [Abbey Church](https://www.buckfast.org.uk/what-to-do-abbey-church/) — Buckfast Abbey
- [A New Chapter for the Medieval Guest Hall](https://www.buckfast.org.uk/a-new-chapter/) — Buckfast Abbey
- [Church of St Mary (Buckfast Abbey)](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1209774) — Historic England
- [Buckfast Abbey, Main Block](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1292865) — Historic England
- [Cistercian Abbeys: Buckfast](https://www.dhi.ac.uk/cistercians/abbeys/buckfast.php) — Digital Humanities Institute
- [Buckfast Abbey](https://www.benedictines.org.uk/our_houses_buckfast_abbey/) — English Benedictine Congregation
- [Buckfast Abbey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckfast_Abbey) — Wikipedia
- [Anscar Vonier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscar_Vonier) — Wikipedia
- [David Charlesworth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Charlesworth) — Wikipedia
- [Bruno Fehrenbacher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Fehrenbacher) — Wikipedia
- [Frederick Walters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Walters) — Wikipedia
- [A. R. Quinton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._R._Quinton) — Wikipedia
- [Charles Lethbridge Kingsford](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lethbridge_Kingsford) — Wikipedia
- [Battle Abbey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Abbey) — Wikipedia
- [Archaeological monitoring and recording at the Guesthouse, Buckfast Abbey, Devon](https://doi.org/10.5284/1141040) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Excavations and building recording at Buckfast Abbey, Devon](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/details.xhtml?recordId=3092388&recordType=Journal) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Buckfast Abbey](https://www.nationalchurchestrust.org/church/buckfast-abbey-buckfastleigh) — National Churches Trust
- [History](https://buckfast.com/history/) — Buckfast
- [Buckfast Abbey, Buckfastleigh, Devon 8.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buckfast_Abbey,_Buckfastleigh,_Devon_8.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Buckfast bee.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buckfast_bee.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Our-lady-buckfast-abbey.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Our-lady-buckfast-abbey.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [A Robin at Buckfast Abbey - geograph.org.uk - 206999.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Robin_at_Buckfast_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_206999.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Gatehouse, Buckfast Abbey - geograph.org.uk - 532560.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gatehouse,_Buckfast_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_532560.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [An undisturbed corner of Buckfast Abbey - geograph.org.uk - 1159763.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_undisturbed_corner_of_Buckfast_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1159763.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Sequoiadendron giganteum at Buckfast Abbey - geograph.org.uk - 1159747.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sequoiadendron_giganteum_at_Buckfast_Abbey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1159747.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Scanbk0009.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scanbk0009.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [004 Buckfast Abbey (5930470356).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:004_Buckfast_Abbey_(5930470356).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [022 Buckfast Abbey (5930474182).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:022_Buckfast_Abbey_(5930474182).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Buckfast Abbey is a living Benedictine monastery at Buckfast, near Buckfastleigh in Devon, in the valley of the River Dart on the edge of Dartmoor. The church is dedicated to St Mary. The community is Roman Catholic, in the Diocese of Plymouth, and the house has been part of the English Benedictine Congregation since 1960. One account places that move as a transfer from the Subiaco Congregation. A survey of 2020 counted thirteen monks. The church stands near 50 degrees 29 minutes 34 seconds north and 3 degrees 46 minutes 32 seconds west. The main block is recorded at grid SX 74141 67369, and the church at SX 74147 67411. A shorter grid, SX741673, is also given for the site.

The first monastery is dated to 1018, during the reign of King Cnut. It was Benedictine from the start, and it was small and unprosperous beside the fifty or so other English abbeys of the eleventh century. The rule then in use for English Benedictine houses was the Regularis Concordia, drawn up at Winchester in about 970. Who founded Buckfast is not agreed. One account names Aethelweard, also called Aylward, ealdorman of Devon. Another names King Cnut. A third says only that a local nobleman founded it in 1018. Domesday Book lists the property, and by the value given there the house ranked as one of the three poorest monasteries in the Wessex group. Alwin, also written Aelwinus, is the first abbot named. He attended the shire-moot at Exeter in about 1040, and Domesday Book records him as abbot in 1066.

Where that first house stood is also uncertain. A site near the river would have been convenient for a small community, but the Dart floods. Excavation in the fourteenth-century guest hall produced a fragment of stone that may have belonged to the Saxon church, and no other evidence of the Saxon monastery has been found on the present site. Archaeological evidence has been taken to suggest a late Anglo-Saxon monastic site at Holy Trinity church in Buckfastleigh, nearby rather than under the later abbey. Simon Brown’s excavations and building record, made before improvements to the visitor facilities and published in 1988, found the twelfth-century precinct and the outer court, and found no remains of the Saxon foundation. A well in the crypt of the later abbey, which may have been Saxon, was destroyed when the new church was built.

For about fifty years after 1086 the history is obscure, and the house seems to have been in decline. King Henry I confirmed the abbey and its possessions at the start of his reign. Another account places a probable decline by the end of the twelfth century, which is a different moment from the years after Domesday. In 1136 King Stephen, whose reign ran from 1135 to 1154, gave Buckfast to the abbot of Savigny. Stephen was sympathetic to monasteries and established or revived many of them. The abbot of Savigny sent a monk of his own house to lead a group across the Channel and to plant the Savignac observance at Buckfast. One account dates the new establishment in the present position to 1134, and another to 1136. It is not known how the remaining members of the older community received the new rule. Eustace is named in a Totnes deed of 1143, and he was abbot when the house was affiliated to Cîteaux.

In 1147 the Savignac congregation merged with the Cistercians, and Buckfast became a Cistercian abbey. The Cistercian reform had begun at Cîteaux at the start of the twelfth century as a return to the Rule of St Benedict in a stricter form. The divine office took about six hours a day and began in the small hours. Elaborate chant gave way to a simpler music. Ornaments were set aside, silence was insisted on, and the diet was vegetarian. The white habit was undyed wool. At Buckfast the change was immediate. The monastery was rebuilt in stone on the Cistercian plan. When monks returned in 1882 they uncovered almost all of those twelfth-century foundations and later rebuilt in the manner of the mid-twelfth century. Limited excavation in 1882 has also been said to show a standard Cistercian layout. The discovery while a monk was digging the vegetable garden is placed in 1883, and by March 1884 the measured plan was drawn.

The church was later extended. At some point in the late twelfth century or the thirteenth, aisles were added to the presbytery. A buttressed chapel at the east end was probably a fourteenth-century addition and may have been a Lady chapel. That would be unusual in a Cistercian church, because the whole church was normally dedicated to St Mary. Quantities of thirteenth-century floor tiles, tracery, and Purbeck marble columns, found in the late nineteenth century, point to further work in the cloister, the chapter house, and the refectory. The thirteenth century has been called one of the peak periods. The north gate’s arch is twelfth-century and is the earliest standing fabric. The barrel-vaulted undercroft by the west cloister is the other survival from the twelfth-century stone abbey that still shows above ground. Excavation in the outer court from 1982 to 1990 indicated that the precinct as a whole probably goes back to the same Cistercian rebuilding. Brown found the twelfth-century boundary on the west, buildings of the outer court on that side, and an enlargement of the enclosure in the early thirteenth century that was never built up.

After a short period of trouble under King John, when England was placed under a papal interdict, Buckfast entered a long stretch of relative stability. The Cistercians’ hold on land made them leading producers of wool. In 1236 the abbot and monks were admitted to the guild of merchants at Totnes. In 1315 Buckfast was listed with Forde, Newenham, and Torre as an exporter of wool to Florence, and it is likely that, like most English abbeys, it had been sending wool to Italy by the end of the century before. By the fourteenth century it was one of the wealthiest abbeys in the south-west. It held extensive sheep runs on Dartmoor, seventeen manors in central and south Devon, town houses in Exeter, fisheries on the Dart and the Avon, and a country house for the abbot at Kingsbridge. At Kingsbridge it had a weekly market and an annual fair, and the town grew from that right. Another account says that by the later Middle Ages it was one of the wealthiest Cistercian abbeys in the south of England, with its own guest hall, almshouse, and school. In the twelfth century there may have been as many as sixty choir monks and perhaps twice as many lay brothers. That figure is also given as a community of probably 180 monks and lay brothers.

The Black Death killed two abbots and many monks. By the middle of the fourteenth century few remained to keep the buildings, and some of them collapsed. By the middle of the fifteenth century the house flourished again. Nineteenth-century excavation suggested a major rebuilding then. The tower attached to the abbot’s lodging is the only part of that work still standing to its height. The abbot’s tower is also dated to the fourteenth century, and to the fourteenth or fifteenth century. It held three small but well-appointed rooms off the west range, each with a fireplace and a garderobe, which suggests lodging for the abbot’s more important guests rather than a private retreat alone. The guest hall is a large fourteenth-century range to the west of the church. It was twice its present height and width, and it was reduced after the dissolution. It now houses the bookshop. A smaller sixteenth-century range stands at right angles to it and keeps an original roof. The south wing of the guest hall is dated to the fifteenth century, survives almost unchanged, and was restored to its earlier appearance in 1992. Brown described the gatehouse remains as early fourteenth century, among the largest medieval halls in Devon and Cornwall, overlying a hall that may be twelfth century, and he identified Abbey Farm as a late medieval south wing of that gatehouse. A later summary says the only medieval buildings to survive are the guest hall and its service buildings in the inner court, re-roofed and used as a visitor centre. Those descriptions do not all name the same range or the same use.

The named heads of the medieval house, as far as the registers, cartularies, and rolls preserve them, run as follows. After Alwin and Eustace, William acted as papal legate in 1190. Nicholas was elected in 1205. Michael is in the cartulary in 1223, Peter in 1242, and a second William in 1249. Howell is in the leger book without dates. Henry appears in 1264 and 1269. Simon appears between 1273 and 1280. Robert appears between 1280 and 1283. Peter de Colepitte appears between 1291 and 1313. A second Robert is named in 1316, William Atte Slade in the Banco rolls for 1327, Stephen in 1328, John of Churchstowe in 1332, and William Gifford in 1333. Stephen of Cornwall is named in 1348 and Philip Beaumont in 1349, the years of the plague, though the list does not itself say that the pestilence killed them. Robert Symons is named between 1355 and 1390, William Paderstow in 1395, William Slade in 1401 and 1415, and William Beaghe between 1415 and 1432. Thomas Roger was prior administrator from about 1422 to 1432 and was blessed as abbot in 1432. John Ffytchett appears in 1440, John Matthu, also called Matthew, in 1449, and John King in the Cistercian statutes from 1464 to 1498. John Rede appears in 1498, John Bleworthy in 1505, Alfred Gyll in 1512, and a second John Rede in 1525, with no record of his death or resignation.

By the sixteenth century the house was in decline even though it was still rich. Between 1500 and 1539 only twenty-two monks were ordained, and ten remained at the surrender and signed the deed. Another count says that only ten monks were in residence in 1539, the last abbot and nine others, all of whom signed. A further account says the monastery then housed only twenty-two monks, set against the much larger twelfth-century community. The Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535 assessed the income at 466 pounds, a large sum beside the early poverty. Historians have often treated monasteries of this generation as corrupt and lax. Some modern historians dispute that picture. Whatever the observance, King Henry VIII wanted the wealth. In 1535 he appointed Thomas Cromwell vicar general, with a charge to visit and reform the religious houses. A year later the smaller houses were closed. The financial decision was justified by a claim of manifest sin and abominable living that the visitors’ reports did not support.

Gabriel Donne, also called Dunne, died in 1558. He was appointed in 1535 by the bishop of Exeter with the encouragement of Thomas Cromwell. He surrendered Buckfast on 25 February 1539 to Sir William Petre, acting for the king. On 26 April 1539 he was granted a pension of 120 pounds a year. The other monks received smaller pensions. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford wrote the life of Gabriel Donne and quoted George Oliver’s survey of the monasteries of the Exeter diocese. Kingsford, born on Christmas Day 1862 in Ludlow and buried at South Tawton in Devon after his death on 29 November 1926, was a historian of the fifteenth century and of London. His life of Donne is the link with this abbey. He was not an abbot here, and his editions of John Stow and his studies of the fifteenth century are not the history of this valley.

The commissioners who closed the West Country houses were lawyers who had already been at work for months. William Petre and John Tregonwell reached Exeter in January 1539 and then divided Devon and Cornwall. Petre was at Torre Abbey on 23 February, at Buckfast on 25 February, at Buckland on 27 February, and at Plympton Priory on 1 March. The two men met again in Dorset on 8 March to close Forde. In four months they visited and closed forty monasteries. At each house they witnessed the deed of surrender, assigned pensions, and took the seals, charters, and church plate. After the campaign they delivered one and a half tons of gold, gilt, and silver to the Tower of London, and that delivery included the treasures of Buckfast. Another account says that one and a half tons of gold, gilt, and silver were taken from this abbey itself to the Tower. Both figures are in the record, and they do not describe the same haul.

Battle Abbey is a different Benedictine house, at Battle in East Sussex, built on the field of Hastings and dedicated to St Martin of Tours. It belongs in this history only as another great monastery closed in the same royal suppression, not as a part of Buckfast. William the Conqueror had vowed a monastery if he won. In 1070 Pope Alexander II ordered the Normans to do penance for the killing done in the conquest, and William placed the high altar where King Harold was said to have fallen on Saturday 14 October 1066. William died before the church was finished. It was completed in about 1094 and consecrated under his son William II, and the king presented his father’s sword and coronation robes there. The first monks came from Marmoutier. The dedication was to the Holy Trinity, St Mary, and St Martin. The church was planned for 140 monks, and there were never more than sixty. William I exempted the church of St Martin of Battle from episcopal jurisdiction, on a level with Canterbury, and added sanctuary, treasure trove, free warren, and inquest. The abbot was mitred, sat in Parliament, and had the peculiar right to pardon a criminal he met on the way to execution. Walter de Luci became abbot in 1139. Under Henry II the churches of Canterbury and Chichester tested the charter and failed. The Roll of Battle Abbey, a list of those who came with William from Normandy, later gathered names that were not authentic. The church was remodelled in the late thirteenth century. It was suppressed in May 1538, the year before Buckfast. Seventeen monks were then in residence. The abbot was John Hamond and the prior Richard Salesherst, and the monks who received pensions included John Henfelde, William Ambrose, Henry Sinden, Thomas Bede, and Thomas Levett, all bachelors in theology. None of that happened in the Dart valley. Buckfast’s own surrender was 25 February 1539, with ten signatories, not seventeen, and its abbot was Gabriel Donne, not John Hamond.

After the surrender the land became the king’s. Tenancies changed less than landlords. William Petre, who had stood at the signing, bought the large manors of South Brent and Churstow. The abbey itself was vacated. The church and the monastic buildings were stripped and left to decay. Lead was melted, furniture was auctioned, and the five bells were bought by the parishioners of Buckfastleigh. Many smaller buildings of the outer court were kept and reused. Sir Thomas Denys, also written Dennys, of Holcombe Burnell near Exeter, about 1477 to 1561, received the site from the crown. He had married Donne’s sister Elizabeth and had been chamberlain of the household to Cardinal Wolsey. One account says the manor of Buckfast and the site were sold to him a year after the surrender, which places the sale in 1540. He stripped the buildings and reduced them to ruins. The site was afterwards used as a quarry. The outer-court buildings stayed largely as they were until the early nineteenth century. As late as 1793 the ruins were still plain to see.

Samuel Berry, a local mill owner, bought the site in 1800 and cleared most of the rubble for a mansion. He kept the abbot’s tower and the twelfth-century undercroft and flattened the rest, including the abbey church. The house is dated about 1800 and about 1806. It was a Gothic, castellated, Tudor-style mansion on the site of the west cloister, and a wool mill was built on the site in 1806. The house was of three storeys, reused medieval masonry, and was originally castellated. Its entrance, with octagonal corner towers and a central bay, can still be seen above a later single-storey entrance. Classical fireplaces were noted inside. Over the next eighty years the property changed hands four times. Dr James Gale held it from 1872. Ten years later he decided to sell, and he wanted a religious community to have it. An advertisement in the Catholic weekly The Tablet called it a grand acquisition if it could be restored to its original purpose. Within six weeks monks were living there again, after a gap of 343 years.

The monks who came had been exiled from La Pierre-qui-Vire, in the Morvan, when the French government in 1880 ordered unauthorised religious houses to be suppressed. The community of St Augustine’s at Ramsgate sheltered them and lent them a house at Leopardstown on the edge of Dublin. In 1882 their superior, Dom Thomas Duperou, also written Dupérou, went with Dom Adam Hamilton of Ramsgate, who translated, to meet Gale at Plymouth. They took a temporary lease and then the option to buy. One account gives the price as 4,700 pounds and says the whole site was purchased. Six Benedictines arrived on 28 October 1882, and the rest came over the following weeks. Another account says they arrived during October and November. Hamilton later wrote a history of the abbey and had a large part in uncovering the medieval foundations. Boniface Natter, christened Anthony and born Anton Natter in Swabia on 24 April 1866, was clothed as a novice at Buckfast in November 1882, took simple vows in November 1883, and was ordained in 1890 by Bishop William Vaughan of Plymouth. There was then no monastery in Swabia, and he returned there at intervals to recruit.

Frederick Walters was appointed to plan the restoration. He is Frederick Arthur Walters, the Scottish-born Catholic architect whose practice designed more than fifty Catholic churches, including this abbey and Ealing Abbey. He was born on 5 February 1849 at 6 South Terrace, Brompton, the son of the architect Frederick Page Walters, served three years as his father’s articled clerk, spent nine years with George Goldie, and set up his own practice in 1878. His son John Edward Walters joined him in 1924. He died on 3 December 1931 at St Mildred’s, Ewell. His first scheme for Buckfast used the 1734 engraving by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck, The East View of Buckfastre-Abby, together with the ruins still standing. That scheme was wrong. Soon afterwards a monk, digging in the vegetable garden, found medieval footings. The community uncovered most of the twelfth-century Cistercian plan. Substantial foundations of the domestic buildings were still being found as late as 1997. By March 1884 Walters had drawn the foundations and proposed a new design in the manner of the mid-twelfth century, studied from Kirkstall and Fountains. The building description calls his claustral ranges a simplified Romanesque, influenced by the history of the site, and calls the church a mixture of English Cistercian and French early Gothic. Other descriptions say Norman Transitional and Early English, and a mixture of Romanesque and Gothic in the nave. The new work is more elaborate than the medieval church in its tower, in vaulting throughout, and in the triforium. The east end does not follow the old plan.

Meanwhile the monastery was being made habitable. The abbot’s tower was restored. A temporary church, now the chapter house, was opened on 25 March 1884. The building description also speaks of an 1882 church, now the chapter house, and of a programme begun in 1883 that followed the medieval cloister, taking in Berry’s house, the tower, and that church. In 1884 work began on the south wing, with kitchen, refectory, and cloister, mostly paid for by Lord Clifford of Chudleigh. The community remained part of La Pierre-qui-Vire until 1899, when Buckfast was made independent. It became an abbey again in 1902. The superiors before the first abbot were Thomas Duperou from 1882 to 1884, who became abbot of the Sacred Heart in the United States; Leander Lemoine from 1884 to 1885; Benedict Gariador as prior from August 1885 to February 1899; Leander Lemoine again in March 1899; Ignatius Jean from April 1899 to March 1900, who was not a monk of Buckfast; Leander Lemoine from March 1900 to July 1902, also abbot visitor; and Savinian Louismet from July to November 1902.

Boniface Natter was elected abbot on 19 November 1902 and blessed on 24 February 1903. One account says that day was exactly 365 years after the closure of the medieval abbey. Another says the date marked the anniversary of the dissolution in 1539. The surrender itself was 25 February 1539, so the blessing fell a day short of the calendar anniversary and the count of years is not a single agreed sum. A papal telegram was read, giving a blessing to the new abbot and to everyone present. A cheque for 1,000 pounds was found in the collection and was used to finish the west wing, with bedrooms and rooms for the novitiate. Dr Macnamara of Torquay is also said to have given 1,000 pounds to begin the rebuilding, with work starting on the west front. Those may be one gift described twice, or two gifts of the same sum. Natter restored the medieval statue of Our Lady of Buckfast. The lower part had been found in an old wall, still with some of its colour and gilding, and it had been damaged at the Reformation. It was blessed in the temporary church on 24 May 1903, kept there, and moved into the new church on 2 August 1922. In May 1906, with the restoration of the foundation under way, he was elected abbot visitor of the French province.

In the summer of 1906 Natter and Anscar Vonier were returning from Rome on the steamship Sirio, sailing from Genoa toward Brazil. On 4 August 1906 the ship struck a reef off the Hormigas Islands, near Cartagena on the Spanish coast. More than 400 people died. Natter and Vonier ministered to the steerage passengers in the confusion. Natter drowned. His body was never recovered. When the news reached Buckfast the community believed both men were dead and said requiem masses. Vonier was saved by a fishing vessel. A memorial in the abbey cemetery carries a Latin inscription naming Boniface Natter as the first abbot of the restored abbey, shipwrecked on the Spanish shore on 4 August 1906, and saying that he rests in the deep until the sea gives up its dead, and that death is swallowed up in victory. The inscription records that Anscar the abbot set it up as his sister’s gift. A photograph of Natter is held at Kew.

Anscar Vonier was born Martin Vonier on 11 November 1875, the feast of Martin of Tours, at Ringschnait near Biberach an der Riss in Württemberg. The family had come from the Tyrol. His father farmed and ran a brickworks. They moved to Rissegg, where the boy went to the local school and served at the altar. In 1888 he was one of the youths recruited for Buckfast. The boys were sent first to a school at Beauvais run by the Holy Ghost Fathers, to learn French, and they reached Buckfast in the summer of 1889. After four years in the alumnate he entered the novitiate in 1893 and received the name Anscar. He was professed in 1894 and ordained in 1898 by Bishop Charles Maurice Graham. In 1900 he went to St Anselmo in Rome and took a doctorate in philosophy. In November 1905 he was sent back there to teach. He was thirty-one when, on 14 September 1906, the community elected him second abbot. He is also called Ansgar. He decided to rebuild the church on the site of the Cistercian church. The foundation stone was laid in January 1907. One account says the work began in 1907 under a small group led by Brother Peter Schrode, who had been sent to a monastery in France to learn masonry. The four principal builders are named as Brother Hilarion Mohn, Brother Peter Schrode, Father Richard Dillenz, and Brother Ignatius Birk.

The church was built as money came in, and the work is said not to have stopped until the building was done, thirty-two years later. There were normally four monks on the building, and never more than six, though the whole community had repaired the old foundations up to ground level. At first the monks cut and dressed all the stone. Later they could buy it ready dressed. Scaffolding was wooden poles lashed with ropes and chains, and stone was lifted with hand hoists. No safety protection is recorded as having been worn. One monk fell fifty feet and survived. In 1931 three monks fell from a hoist without serious injury. During the First World War about two-thirds of the community were German. They were not sent to an internment camp on condition that they stayed inside the grounds, and they were forbidden to leave without a special licence. Some of the local population were hostile. Money still arrived. In 1910 Sir Robert Harvey gave a peal of fourteen bells in memory of his wife Alida. The bells now in the tower were cast in 1935 by John Taylor and Co. and are also said to have been given by Sir Robert Harvey. There is a ring of twelve, with a tenor of 41 long hundredweight, and two extra semitone bells, around a bourdon of 7.5 tons called Hosanna, fifteen bells in all. They are hung for change ringing, with an Ellacombe chiming apparatus that is at present out of use. Most of the furnishings were gifts: the Stations of the Cross, the stone carving on the side-chapel altars, the stained glass, the candelabra, and the corona of lights over the sanctuary. Mr and Mrs Schiller were among the benefactors photographed with the builders in 1925.

A watercolour by A. R. Quinton, about 1920, shows the church with the tower still unfinished. A. R. Quinton is Alfred Robert Quinton, born in Peckham on 28 October 1853 and died in Finchley on 10 December 1934, a watercolour painter of English and Welsh towns whose pictures were widely issued as postcards. The unfinished tower at Buckfast is the picture that ties him to this house. His ride from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, and the calendars and plates made after his work, are not events of the abbey.

The church was consecrated on 25 August 1932. By then everything but the upper part of the tower was done. Twenty-five years of labour had passed since the foundation stone. Cardinal Bourne represented the pope. Five archbishops, sixteen bishops, thirty abbots, and many priests took part. The church was full, loudspeakers carried the service to thousands outside, and the service was broadcast. The last stone of the tower was set on 24 July 1937, which one account calls the completion of the church in 1937. Pointing and the removal of the scaffolding were finished in December 1938, in the last weeks of that year. Vonier had been away lecturing. He returned on 6 December 1938, ill with a cold, and the builders had hurried the last scaffolding down so that he could see the work complete. He died three weeks later, on 26 December 1938, and was buried in the church four days afterwards. A writer recalled him saying that once the church was completed and the whole building finished, he had done his task and could go. Another telling says he fell ill and died just before the last pinnacle was set. The two endings cannot both be the last hour of the tower. He was buried in the church. Benno Elkan made a bronze memorial for the south aisle. One summary calls this the only medieval monastery in England to have been restored and put back to its original use. His books include The Christian Mind, The Personality of Christ, The Victory of Christ, The Divine Motherhood, The Spirit and the Bride, The People of God, A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist, The Human Soul and Its Relations with Other Spirits, Christianus, The Life of the World to Come, and The Angels.

Bruno Fehrenbacher was born Hermann Fehrenbacher on 27 July 1895 at Mengen in Württemberg, one of five children. At the grammar school there he met a monk from Buckfast, and at fifteen he joined the community, as many young men from southern Germany did, because the house needed hands for a ruin that had stood for centuries. Anscar Vonier and Boniface Natter came from the same region. Fehrenbacher was ordained in 1919, studied philosophy at St Anselmo, and took his doctorate in 1922. He became a British citizen in 1935. From 1937 to 1939 he taught Syriac clergy at the Benedictine seminary in Jerusalem and at Charfet. After Vonier’s death he was elected on 10 January 1939. He was installed on 24 February 1939 by Dom Adrian Taylor, abbot of St Augustine’s at Ramsgate, and he received the abbatial blessing on 23 March 1939. Most of the community were still German by birth, though from the 1920s men from Britain and Ireland had begun to join. Five English monks became army chaplains. Those named are Paulinus Angold, Robert Nicholl, Placid Hooper, and Charles Norris. One French lay brother was mobilised by his own government. The older German monks, naturalised as British subjects, stayed. The house was not bombed. The community helped local firefighters, farmed hard, and gave refuge to the staff and 100 pupils of St Boniface’s Catholic College from Plymouth. The college’s own dates for that evacuation are 1941 to 1945. The school later named a house Abbey in memory of it. After the war Fehrenbacher extended the monastery and rebuilt and enlarged the organ. His health failed. He resigned in 1956 and was titular abbot of Tavistock. He had served the nuns at Stanbrook, near Worcester, as assistant chaplain. He returned to Buckfast in 1964 and died on 18 July 1965.

Placid Hooper was elected on 5 January 1957 and was the first English abbot, over a community that was by then mostly British. He had entered in 1929 and had been a forces chaplain in Europe and the Middle East. He ruled until 1976, remained titular abbot of Tavistock, and died on 11 December 1995. In 1960 the community joined the English Benedictine Congregation. Houses of that congregation were marked by schools. After years of preparation, a new building, and training for some of the monks, a preparatory school for boys and girls aged seven to thirteen opened in 1967. It closed in 1994, when boarding numbers no longer supported it. Another account ties the closure to the changing landscape of private education in the south-west, and says the buildings became a conference centre and a place for educational activities. Two former monks were later convicted and imprisoned for sexually abusing boys during the life of the school. William Philip Manahan, elected abbot on 10 December 2003, resigned in December 2006 and was convicted and imprisoned. Reports of the cases were published in August 2007 and November 2007.

Leo Smith was elected on 30 January 1976 and ruled until 1992. He was afterwards titular abbot of Colchester and died on 10 July 1998. Under him the education department was created in 1985, so that schools could visit and learn the life of the house. By the late 1970s Buckfast was among the most visited places in the West Country, with some 300,000 visitors a year, and the rooms and paths were not enough. A new car park, a gift shop, and the Grange restaurant began the largest building work since the church. Another count says the abbey attracts nearly 300,000 visitors a year, and a third says nearly 300,000 a year in the years of the later energy works. The figures sit beside one another. They are not a single audited census.

David Charlesworth was born on 6 October 1951. He was educated at St Brendan’s College in Bristol, a school of the Christian Brothers, and he entered Buckfast at eighteen. He had not intended to be a priest in the monastery. He was sent to Newman College of Higher Education in Birmingham for a teaching qualification, and after fourteen years he completed priestly studies at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford. He was ordained in the Diocese of Plymouth on 24 June 1984. In the 1970s and 1980s he taught at the preparatory school as housemaster, mathematics and science master, and deputy head. He was elected abbot on 3 January 1992, at the age of forty, and served until 1999. He was then titular abbot of Malmesbury. In that first term he added a car park, a gift shop, and the Grange restaurant, revived the gardens and the apiaries, and managed the retirement of Brother Adam, the beekeeper. He was chair of governors of St Mary’s School, Buckfast, for eight years. The preparatory school on the abbey ground is a separate institution from that governorship in the accounts that name both. At the end of the first term he became chaplain to the Benedictine nuns of Oulton Abbey in Staffordshire, and later chairman of the Oulton Abbey Trust, which, with help from Buckfast, built a new care home there.

The years between his terms are recorded in more than one order. Sebastian Wolff was prior administrator from January 2000. Manahan’s election and resignation, and Richard Yeo’s term as abbot administrator from February 2007 until January 2009, fill the gap before the next election. David Charlesworth was re-elected on 27 January 2009. One account gives that second term as lasting until 2017, then names him abbot administrator from 2017 to 2019, then titular abbot of Tewkesbury, then two years at St James’ Priory in Bristol until a third election. The abbey’s own list dates the appointment as abbot administrator to January 2018, after the community failed to elect, and names Gavin Francis Straw as prior administrator from March 2019. Both accounts give the third election as 9 April 2021. After one of the returns he has continued to visit St James’ Priory every fortnight. St James’ Priory is the oldest building in Bristol and a twelfth-century Benedictine foundation. It is not this abbey.

As first director he enlarged the education department that had been set up in 1985. In 2013 Birmingham Newman University gave him an honorary doctorate of education, presented at Symphony Hall in Birmingham. In the third term he founded the Buckfast Institute for Ecclesiastical Studies. He established the abbey choir in its present form in 2009. The choir sings solemn mass and vespers on Sundays and mass on holy days, with trebles from local schools added as the Abbey Choristers in 2018. The choristers’ first foreign tour, in 2025, went to Swabia, the region of Anscar Vonier’s birth, in the year of the 150th anniversary of 11 November 1875. Matthew Searles was named master of the music in an announcement of 28 October 2022. In 2018 the choir sang Christmas midnight mass on national television. In 2024 it gave the first performance of a mass for Corpus Christi by Martin Baker. The record label Ad Fontes, devoted to sacred music, has issued the abbey’s choirs and organists and has also recorded with the choir of Westminster Cathedral. The relic of St Thomas More’s hair shirt, kept at a side altar, was made available for public veneration in 2016, after arrangements with the Diocese of Plymouth. Reports of the enshrinement are dated 21 November 2016 and 26 November 2016. Three former Anglican bishops were ordained in the church. For the millennium of 2018 a papal legate, Cardinal Anders Arborelius, was appointed by Pope Francis. A new statue of Our Lady of Buckfast was set outside the church, a millennium garden was made, and a permanent monastic exhibition was opened. In 2017 David Charlesworth said that human beings like the idea of a thousand years of continuity.

The cleaning and conservation of the church exterior and interior began in 2011. In 2013 and 2014 a new floor of Purbeck stone was laid, with a further section of Cosmati paving around the altar. His own summary dates the cleaning, the Purbeck floor, and the Cosmati work across 2011 to 2014. An organ by the Italian builders Fratelli Ruffatti, the first of theirs in Britain, was installed in 2017 and first played in public in 2018. It has 5,537 pipes. A quire organ of four divisions and pedal stands on both sides of the quire and in the upper triforium, and a grand organ of two divisions and pedal stands in the west gallery. The two can be played separately or together from either of two consoles. A pontifical trumpet en chamade projects from the west case. This replaced a Hele and Walker organ whose basis was installed in 1922 and altered afterwards. Ralph Downes rescaled and revoiced the pipework and made important changes to the stop list in the 1940s and 1950s. One account says pipe organs were installed in 2017, which matches the Ruffatti date and sits beside the older instrument that was already there.

The Blessed Sacrament chapel is dated in several ways. Construction is shown in 1964. One building account places the east end in 1965, to the designs of Paul Pearn, as a concrete chapel on four columns with a shallow gabled roof and an undercroft. The chapel is also said to have been inaugurated in 1966, after the liturgical changes that followed the Second Vatican Council, and to answer the needs of visitors and of the parish. A visitors’ guide dates the chapel to 1968. In 1968 Dom Charles Norris completed the east window in dalle de verre, coloured glass tiles set in resin. The church itself is given as built from 1907 to 1932 on the medieval footings except at the east end, as built from 1906 to 1938, and as completed in 1937 for the tower stone and in 1938 for the pointing. The plan is a nave of eight lean-to aisle bays plus a galleried western bay, a crossing tower, transepts with chapels, a choir of three bays with aisles, and the eastern chapel. The west door has three orders of zigzag, billet, and chevron. The tower rises three stages above the nave roof, with a crow-stepped parapet and plate-traceried belfry windows. The interior is stone-vaulted. The nave vault is ribbed with a red sandstone infill. The choir uses carved capitals and a stone infill. The chapter house sits in a wing at the south-west, not in the usual east-range position, because the medieval tower and Berry’s house were kept. The refectory is in the south range, and the monks’ cells are on the upper floors. The main block uses local grey limestone rubble, with some Bath stone and Ham Hill dressings, and slate roofs. The west front of the cloister is seven bays, and the gable over the door is carved with the word pax.

The church and the main block were both listed on 10 January 1951 at grade two star. The main block’s entry was amended on 30 December 1993. The north gate, the south gate, and the guest house were listed on the same January day at the lower grade. The cores sit in a walled precinct, with medieval gates to the north and south and a modern gate to the west built in 1984. The Grange, a restaurant and tearoom, was built in 1990 beside the north gate. Nothing in the records read for this draft inscribes the abbey as world heritage. The grade two star designation is a national listing of the buildings, not an international inscription of the valley.

Southgate, a retreat centre, was blessed and opened in 1993. Northgate House, a hotel for conference guests and for other visitors, was blessed and opened in 2015. St Cuthbert’s conference centre stands on the former school site. Men can be lodged in the monastic guest house, and men and women in a restored building. Groups use Grangehurst. A man may stay in the monastery for a week’s retreat. In 2012 an Archimedes screw turbine of 84 kilowatts was set in the Dart, described as one of the largest in the country, to supply the abbey and to send surplus power outward, with a design meant to spare fish. Rainwater harvesting, solar panels, and tree planting followed. The salmon pass was rebuilt in 2021 and the eel pass was improved. Two gardens lie on the west, with herbs, medicinal plants, and poisonous plants. A garden inside is kept for the monks. A bridge crosses the river to the farm, where vegetables are grown and bees, pigs, and cattle are kept. The shop sells wine, honey, beeswax, fudge, and goods from religious houses elsewhere.

The product that travelled furthest is Buckfast Tonic Wine. The monks began to make a fortified wine in the 1890s. Another account dates the recipe to 1897, when the nephew of a French monk brought it, at a time when the community also made liniments and medicines. In 1927 the abbey lost its licence to sell wine. The abbot allowed merchants to distribute it, and the recipe was changed so that it was less of a patent medicine and more of a medicated wine. Its link with violent disorder, especially in Scotland, became a public argument. A health minister condemned it on 24 September 2006. On 18 January 2010 an account spoke of 5,000 crime reports. The abbey rejected the blame on 25 December 2013 and had employed a youth worker in one of the places affected. After police in Scotland fixed anti-crime labels to bottles in some areas, the distributor for Great Britain, J. Chandler and Co., said on 22 February 2013 that it would go to law.

Brother Adam, born Karl Kehrle in Germany in 1898 and died in 1996, took charge of the bees in 1919. Thirty of the monastery’s forty-six colonies had been wiped out by the illness then called Isle of Wight disease and later called Acarine. The dead bees were of the old British black strain, now extinct in Britain. The sixteen hives that lived went back to Italian queens from the Ligurian Alps. At the request of the government he helped to restock the country with the resistant Buckfast bee. Breeding of that pedigree is now regulated by a European federation in more than twenty-six countries. The commercial apiary at the abbey, once nearly 400 hives, is no longer run on that scale. The page that describes the strain also says that Buckfast bees are no longer kept at the abbey, and that the teaching apiary now has four hives, for courses, workshops, and days with the bees. David Charlesworth’s first term is credited with seeing Brother Adam into retirement and with keeping a place for beekeeping.

The tower’s bells were the centre of a millennium ringing festival in August 2018, counted as a thousand years from the foundation of 1018. The solemnity of Our Lady of Buckfast for that anniversary was kept on 24 May 2018. The School of the Annunciation, a charitable company in the grounds for adult study in theology, philosophy, catechetics, liturgy, and related subjects, was founded in 2014 by Petroc Willey, Andrew Beards, and Caroline Farey, who had left the Maryvale Institute, together with the abbot. It closed in August 2019 for lack of funds.

The medieval guest hall was built with its main room upstairs, so that the hall stayed warmer while the stone cellar stayed cool and dry. A medieval privy still clings to an outer wall. The abbey bought the building back in the 1980s, when it was a tearoom run by the Benthal Trust. It has since been used for staff gatherings, ordination receptions, and exhibitions. A renewal, including a lift and modern facilities, has been in the hands of Oldrieve Construction. When a new conduit was cut under the stone floor, an archaeologist working with Oakford Archaeology watched the ground. Nothing was found but bare earth. The account hoped the hall would open again by the end of May, and it did not give the year. A separate record of February 2025 describes a watching brief by the same practice, written up by H. Wootton, during works at the guesthouse inside the inner court. The trench was 18 metres long and 0.4 metres wide, and up to 1.2 metres deep. It ran west from the middle of the road along the south side of the guesthouse, then turned northwest and entered by the western of the twin doors in the south wall. Under the modern road and under deposits of the 1990s there was natural subsoil. Two sherds, weighing 12 grams, came from the road cutting: one piece of whiteware of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and a fragment of nineteenth-century clay-pipe stem. Nothing of significance was found. The work had been required by the Secretary of State, on the advice given for a site of this standing. Whether that trench and the conduit under the guest-hall floor are one job or two is not stated. They should not be collapsed into a single find.

In January 2026 a watching brief at Buckfast Methodist Chapel, not at the abbey church, cut a foundation trench 5.3 metres long, 1.55 metres wide, and 0.5 metres deep. It exposed a possible late medieval or post-medieval wall foundation. It is unclear whether that wall was part of a building or a boundary of the farmstead that followed the dissolution. After the wall was demolished the ground was landscaped and stayed open until the chapel was built in the late nineteenth century. A visitors’ note dates that chapel to 1881, the year before the monks returned. Twelve sherds of eighteenth- to twentieth-century glass and pottery came from the topsoil, and nothing earlier than the eighteenth century was found. That wall is not a discovery from the abbey church or from the twelfth-century footings under it.

The monastery supports itself with the farm, the shops, and the restaurant. The church remains what the rebuild was for: a place of prayer for a community that returned in 1882 to a ruin, finished a church in the 1930s on the Cistercian plan, and still keeps the hours in a valley where a small Benedictine house was founded in 1018.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/buckfast-abbey