After Dissolution
By 1828 the former friary church had fallen into serious disrepair and the town council decided to demolish it. The buildings were blown up, the ground levelled and the site in the town centre redeveloped with houses and shops: some buildings used parts of the old friary walls as foundations. The churchyard containing thousands of common and noble graves was cleared and the most recently buried bodies transferred to a cemetery a few streets away. The altarpiece however was preserved and is now located in Thurø Church.
Recent excavations by Svendborg Museum have revealed that the later friary complex was much larger than was previously thought, and contained many structures in addtition to the old rectangular layout.
Read more about this topic: Svendborg Friary
Famous quotes containing the word dissolution:
“...that absolutely everything beloved and cherished of the bourgeoisie, the conservative, the cowardly, and the impotent—the State, family life, secular art and science—was consciously or unconsciously hostile to the religious idea, to the Church, whose innate tendency and permanent aim was the dissolution of all existing worldly orders, and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“From low to high doth dissolution climb,
And sink from high to low, along a scale
Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail;”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)