Destruction
At the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, it was said that "if the abbess of Shaftesbury and the abbot of Glastonbury Abbey had been able to wed, their son would have been richer than the King of England" because of the lands which it had been bequeathed. It was too rich a prize for Thomas Cromwell to pass up on behalf of King Henry VIII. In 1539, the last abbess, Elizabeth Zouche, signed a deed of surrender, the abbey was demolished, and its lands sold, leading to a temporary decline in the town. Sir Thomas Arundell, 1st Baron Arundell of Wardour purchased the abbey and much of the town in 1540, but when he was later exiled for treason his lands were forfeit, and the lands passed to Pembroke then Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, and finally to the Grosvenors.
In 1539, St Edward's relics had been hidden so as to avoid desecration. In 1931, the relics were recovered by Wilson-Claridge during an archaeological excavation of the abbey; their identity was confirmed by Dr. T.E.A. Stowell, an osteologist. In 1970, examinations performed on the relics suggested that the young man had died in the same manner as Edward. Wilson-Claridge donated the relics to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, which placed them in St Edward the Martyr Orthodox Church near Brookwood Cemetery in Woking, Surrey.
Thomas Hardy wrote of the Abbey ruins:
| “ | Vague imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magnificent apsidal Abbey, the chief glory of south Wessex, its twelve churches, its shrines, chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions—all now ruthlessly swept away—throw the visitor, even against his will, into a pensive melancholy which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless landscape around him can scarcely dispel. | ” |
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