Lacock Abbey

The greatest attraction in Lacock is the old abbey, which was converted into a manor house with the dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s by the magnificent fuck Henry VIII. It's quite a building; you have the ground floors pretty much as they were back when the nuns still ruled the place, while the upper levels are full of old furniture and books and portraits and all sorts of goodies.

The structure was started in 1232 by Ela, Countess of Salisbury. She'd lost her husband and eventually retired to the convent in 1238. I learned some stuff I did not know here today. For example, throughout the period of the nunneries, at no time were there more than 3,500 nuns in all of England. At the time of the dissolution, there were at most 1,900.

If you were from the lower classes you probably weren't interested in enrolling anyways and even iffin you were, you wouldn't have been able to afford the dowry you had to pay to the nunnery. Many lords and people in power found it wise to lock their wives away for a while in a convent, while lots of widows retired there on their own initiative. These people were called boarders, and they provided the nuns with much welcome rent.

So in short, nuns were largely young women from the highest levels of society, who became nuns to get an education and possibly to avoid being married off. Or they were put in an abbey because their fathers had given up on finding them someone... Maybe I'm a cynic, maybe I just have a filthy imagination, but I imagine these nunneries as hotbeds of lesbian activities back when such things could not take place publicly (much as I envision monasteries as places for gays).

The property eventually passed on to the Talbot family, and the inventor of the photography, William Henry Fox Talbot lived here for much of the 19th century. His granddaughter was the last owner of the house and gave it to the National Trust in 1944.

Pics here.

The west wing of the house.


Colorful section of the south wing.


This hallway was used in one of the Harry Potter movies.


This room was a classroom in Harry Potter.


The somewhat modernized kitchen. There was once a huge, Tudor fireplace here with spitroasts and whatnot.


From more modern times.


The last owner, Matilda Talbot, used to invite lots of children to her grand hall, where she'd feed them cakes and let them play games. If I'm ever old and rich, I'll probably just hoard everything in bitter solitude.


She also ran cookery classes. Don't laugh, I could have asked this question.


They had an actual fire going in the fireplace.


It's good to be filthy rich.


Play it again, Sam.


In one room they had two of those machines where figures are lit up from the inside, so it looks like the shadows are dancing around across the walls.


This room was built by William Sharington, who bought the property after the nuns were kicked out. He used it to store his ill-begotten treasury. Sharington was wildly reputed to be one of the most corrupt fucks of the 16th century and even served time in the Tower.