Qualla: Malling Abbey

Malling Abbey: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 28 October 1538, two of Thomas Cromwell's agents arrived at Malling Abbey in West Malling, Kent, with a deed of surrender for the nuns to sign. They seized the abbey's seal. They explained the legal position. And then, according to the surviving records, they failed to persuade a single nun to put her name to the document. The agents signed instead. Four hundred and fifty years of Benedictine life ended that morning - though the women who refused to sign the papers were eventually pensioned off, scattered to family homes, or to other houses not yet suppressed.

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Malling Abbey: Gundulf's Foundation

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The manor of West Malling had been granted by King Edmund I to Burgric, Bishop of Rochester, in 946. The land was lost in the Danish Wars, then restored to the diocese in 1076. Around 1090, Bishop Gundulf of Rochester - a Norman cleric who had been a monk at the abbey of Bec in N...

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Malling Abbey: Plague and Fire

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

As the abbey prospered, the market town around it grew. Then came the calamities. In 1190, only a century after the foundation, a fire destroyed much of the abbey and the town with it. The community rebuilt, and the rebuilt complex was the one that endured for the next three cent...

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Malling Abbey: Elizabeth Rede's Refusal

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The last freely elected abbess was Elizabeth Rede. She had defied both Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell over the appointment of a high steward for the abbey - an officer who handled the community's legal and estate business, and whom Cromwell wanted to be one of his own clients. Re...

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Malling Abbey: Charlotte Boyd's Trust

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the mid-18th century, a London banker named Frazer Honeywood bought the site and built a neo-Gothic mansion on it, repairing what medieval fabric still stood. Then, in 1892, the property passed to Charlotte Boyd - a remarkable Victorian woman whose stated life's work was to cr...

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Malling Abbey: The Present Sisters

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The community that has lived at Malling Abbey continuously since 1916 was founded in 1891 as the "Community of the Holy Comforter" - an active parish sisterhood working among the poor in Edmonton, north London. Through the preaching of Abbot Aelred Carlyle, they became attracted ...

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