My awareness of what’s left of Evesham’s once-great abbey was limited in the past to a few fragments. First, the impressive free-standing bell tower, the work of Abbot Lichfield and completed in about 1530, just a few years before the abbey was dissolved by Henry VIII. This tower is to the right in my photograph. Little else remains apart from the Great Gateway and the Almonry, which now houses a museum that contains, among much else, some fragments of carving from the old abbey buildings. What I’d missed until my visit the other day was this arch, which originally led from the abbey’s cloister (to the left in my photograph) into a passage that led beneath the monks’ dormitory into the chapter house – in other words, it formed the approach to the second most important space in the monastery after the church itself.
This arch is much older than the bell tower, and was probably built in around 1290. There are two tall niches at the bottom, from the top of which the arch springs into a curving form decorated with figures in canopied niches. These figures are discernible although very knocked about and worn. Through the arch the spire of the adjacent church of St Lawrence, one of Evesham’s parish churches, is just visible. The arch must have been magnificent when it was new and protected from the weather. Entrances to monastic and cathedral chapter houses are often beautiful pieces of masonry – think of the one at Wells, up its glorious stone steps, or that at Southwell Minster, with some of the best stone carving of the 14th century. This one must have been impressive too.
Work is currently underway on the cloister site to the left of the arch, with much levelling and earth moving going on; the to the right is a well used public park. One hopes that when the work is done and the various temporary security fences are taken away, we’ll be able to appreciate this bit of medieval masonry again and that, for all its decay, it will have a setting worthy of its quality.
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