X. Reculver: its Saxon Church and Cross

Extract

The history of the monastery of Reculver is short and scanty. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 669 Egbert, king of Kent, gave ‘Raculf’ to Bassa, the mass priest, mynster to tymbrianne. Ten years later there occurs a grant by King Lothair of Kent to Brihtwald, abbot of the monastery of ‘Raculf’, showing that the monastery was then in being. In 692 abbot Brihtwald was made Archbishop of Canterbury, a promotion unlikely to have come to the head of a small and obscure house. In 747 King Eadberht of Kent granted to Abbot Denebach the toll of one ship in Fordwich, and in 761 was himself buried in the abbey church. After that no record survives, except that in 949 King Edred granted Reculver and its possessions to the archbishopric of Canterbury. The abbey may have been laid waste by the Danes; at any rate it had evidently ceased to exist as a monastic house by the tenth century. It continued thenceforward as a parish church, and remained in use till 1805, when on account of its distance from the houses of parishioners it was abandoned and partly pulled down. Its western towers, with their wooden spires, were left standing as a seamark, and came under the control of the Trinity House. Finally in 1925 the church and its site were placed in the charge of the Commissioners of Works under the terms of the Ancient Monuments Act of 1913.