Whatever Modwen built fell silent for generations until 1003, when a Mercian nobleman named Wulfric Spott decided to refound the place as a proper Benedictine abbey. Wulfric was a thegn of significant means, and the charter he secured from King Aethelred the Unready in 1004 confirming the gift still survives, an Anglo-Saxon document of remarkable detail listing the lands he transferred. He was buried in the cloister in 1010, beside the grave of his wife, anchoring the abbey to the soil with the bodies of its patrons. By the time the Domesday commissioners arrived in 1086, Burton controlled estates scattered across Staffordshire, Derbyshire, and Leicestershire, holdings in Mickleover and Stapenhill, in Appleby Magna and Coton in the Elms. The map of its possessions reads like a tour of the East Midlands.

Burton Abbey was always poor for its station. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries perhaps thirty monks lived here. By the 1520s the number had nearly halved. Mismanagement and outright fraud by various abbots kept the books in chaos for stretches of the medieval period. Yet despite the bad arithmetic, Burton mattered. By the 1530s it was the wealthiest religious house in Staffordshire, and its abbot moved in serious circles. He served on royal and papal commissions, collected clerical taxes for the diocese, and was summoned to Parliament at various points between 1295 and 1322, and again in 1532. The monks even composed the Annals of Burton, a Latin chronicle that is now one of the most important sources historians have for thirteenth-century English politics. A poor abbey, but a literate one.

Kings came and went. William the Conqueror stopped here. Henry II passed through. Edward I made the abbey a stop on his northern progresses. For a small Benedictine house in a market town, this was unusually high traffic, and the abbey paid the price of hospitality in food, wine, and stretched accounts. Then Henry VIII's commissioners arrived in 1539, and the dissolution swept through Burton as it had swept through everywhere else. In a strange epilogue, the abbey was briefly refounded in 1541 as a small college, the last abbot reinstalled as dean, but four years later that too was dissolved. The lands and ruins were granted to Sir William Paget, a courtier on the make, and the chapter house began its long decay into scattered stone.

The most surprising afterlife of Burton Abbey was commercial. Around 1712 a man named George Hayne opened the River Trent Navigation and leased the abbey grounds to build a wharf. The monks were long gone, but the water that had served the abbey now served barges, and the barges carried barrels. Burton's hard, gypsum-rich water happened to be perfect for brewing pale ales, and within a generation the town was sending beer down the Trent to Hull, then by sea to the Baltic, then eventually to India for the troops of the East India Company. The brewing dynasties that built modern Burton, Bass, Worthington, Allsopp, all traced their access to the river through that original 1712 lease on abbey land. A medieval monastery became, by accident, the launchpad of an industrial export economy.

Fragments of the old abbey still surface unexpectedly. In 1967 construction workers extending Burton Technical College broke through into two underground vaults, almost certainly the abbey's wine cellars. The larger chamber was given a second life that the Benedictines could not have foreseen: it became the student union's nightclub, christened, with grim wit, The Vault. Above ground, the parish church of St Modwen, rebuilt between 1719 and 1728 on the site of the abbey nave, still carries the saint's name forward. Two domestic buildings survive in altered form, one as a former manor house and one, the old infirmary, now an inn called simply The Abbey. The poorest Benedictine house in England turned out, in the end, to be the most adaptable.