Tilty was founded in 1153 as a daughter house of Warden Abbey in Bedfordshire, part of the Cistercian Order that had spread across Western Europe in the twelfth century with breathtaking speed. The Cistercians were the reform movement of the medieval Church - white robes instead of Benedictine black, plain stone churches without ornament, communities deliberately sited in remote valleys far from worldly distraction. The Essex countryside of the Chelmer headwaters fitted the pattern well. The monks built their abbey in a quiet bend of the small River Chelmer, made their living from sheep and from the wool trade that funded so much of Cistercian Britain, and added a chapel-of-ease for their lay servants and the local villagers. That chapel - a Gothic nave with thirteenth-century lancet windows - is what stands today.

By the early sixteenth century Tilty was small. When Henry VIII's Act for the Suppression of the Lesser Monasteries was passed in February 1536, dissolving houses with annual incomes under £200, Tilty was on the list. The visitation came in March, just weeks after the act passed - the operation was running fast. The abbot, John Palmer, signed the indenture surrendering the house. He and his five remaining brethren were permitted to remain in the buildings until the King's further pleasure. Palmer was given a pension of sixty shillings and kept his five named servants. The arrangements show that the dissolution, brutal in aggregate, was sometimes managed with attention to human consequences at the local level - the King's commissioners required the abbot to continue supporting his elderly mother and the two parish dependents who had been receiving alms.

What makes Tilty's record extraordinary is the inventory taken on the same day. It survives in the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII and reads like a domestic still life of a vanishing way of life. In the vestry, two altar cloths of white Bruges satin marked with red velvet blood-drops. Twenty-nine pieces of vestments. A cope of blue damask and three of silk worked with golden beasts. In the buttery, six basins of latten - a yellow copper alloy - and three salt cellars of pewter. In the kitchen, two brass pots, sixteen old-fashioned pewter platters, an iron flesh hook and weights of lead. In the abbot's bedchamber, a silver and gilt cross, a censer, ten silver spoons. In the brewhouse, three brass pots hung over the furnace and three brewing vats. In the church, twelve candlesticks, two great standards of latten, a pair of organs. In the larder, the salt fish.

The plate was delivered to Mr Richard Cromwell - Thomas Cromwell's nephew - on the spot. The land was sold off. The abbey buildings were pulled down or quarried for stone, as happened to monastic houses across England. By the late sixteenth century only the chapel remained, with its lancet windows and its thirteenth-century arcade. The nave became the parish church of Tilty, an unusually large building for what is essentially a hamlet of farms and a few houses. There is no town here, only flat fields and an English country lane. Visitors still come, partly for the architecture and partly because the documents make the place specific in a way that most ruined abbeys are not. You know what was in the larder on the day everything ended.

St Mary the Virgin, Tilty, is a Grade I listed building. The thirteenth-century chancel and nave form the bulk of the church, with later additions in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Inside there is a piscina in the chancel wall, where the priest washed the sacred vessels, and an effigy of a knight in a recess - believed to be Sir Gerard de Furnival, who died in 1219. The roof timbers are medieval. The font is Norman. Outside, the churchyard slopes gently down toward the River Chelmer, which flows through the field where the abbey's main church once stood. Earthworks in the meadow mark the position of the cloister, the dormitory, the chapter house. The names of the dependents Cromwell's commissioners required John Palmer to keep supporting - Alice Mills, Agnes Lucas, Thomas Ewen - do not appear on any monument. They were the small mercies a vanishing institution kept until the end.