Qualla: Buildwas Abbey

Buildwas Abbey: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bob Bowyer, CC BY-SA 2.0. Roof gone. Most of the cloister gone. The east end stripped of its altar, the great west window without glass for nearly five centuries. Yet the church at Buildwas still stands - walls, arcades, crossing tower, transepts, the lot - more or less as the Cistercian masons left it around 1170. Three centuries of rain and stone-robbing after the Dissolution, and Buildwas refused to fall down. It is now one of the best-preserved twelfth-century Cistercian churches in Britain, in the care of English Heritage, sitting beside the River Severn about two miles upstream of Ironbridge, on a road that runs out of nowhere into nowhere through some of the quietest countryside in Shropshire.

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Image: Bob Bowyer | CC BY-SA 2.0

Buildwas Abbey: A Savigniac Foundation

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Grahamec, CC BY-SA 3.0. The abbey was founded in 1135 by Roger de Clinton, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, on land that had belonged to his diocese. He did not found a Cistercian house. He founded a Savigniac one - a small, reformed offshoot of the Benedictine order centred on the Abbey of Savigny in ...

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Image: Grahamec | CC BY-SA 3.0

Buildwas Abbey: Abbot Ranulf's Years

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JohnArmagh, Public domain. Things changed under Abbot Ranulf, who took office by 1155 and ruled until 1187. Ranulf was a builder, an administrator, and a regular traveller on Cistercian business. The abbey acquired land in Shropshire, Staffordshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, and even Cambridgeshire. It built u...

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Image: JohnArmagh | Public domain

Buildwas Abbey: The Black Death

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JohnArmagh, Public domain. The fourteenth century brought catastrophe in waves. In 1342 the abbot of Buildwas - his name unknown - was murdered, possibly in Ireland, where he had been investigating a quarrel between the Dublin daughter house and Dunbrody Abbey. A monk called Thomas of Tonge was indicted fo...

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Image: JohnArmagh | Public domain

Buildwas Abbey: Welsh Raiders

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fabian Musto, CC BY-SA 2.0. The worst was not over. In 1350, while the plague was still receding, a large raiding party from Powys broke into Buildwas, looted the church and the monastic chests of jewels, vestments, chalices and books, and carried the abbot and his monks away as prisoners to mid-Wales. A ro...

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Image: Fabian Musto | CC BY-SA 2.0

Buildwas Abbey: Dissolution and Romantic Ruin

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P L Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. A Cistercian visitation in 1521 found the abbey "very far from virtue in every way" - a judgement standard enough that historians read it as the formula of impending dissolution rather than as actual scandal. The abbot Richard Emery was deposed. In 1536 Buildwas was suppressed in...

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Image: P L Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0