From the Refectory one comes into the ruined cloisters, lovely with all manner of flowers, and so to the site of the old Chapter House, of the sacristy and the monastic buildings.  All that remains is in the early Decorated style of the end of the thirteenth century.  Here, too, upon the north stood the great abbey church, three hundred and thirty-five feet long, a cruciform building consisting of nave with two aisles, central tower, transepts with aisles, chancel with circular apse and chapels, now marked out in chalk upon the grass.  All about are the woods, meadows, fishponds and greens of the monks who are gone.

I do not know how this strikes another who shall see it to-day, in all its useless beauty, in the midst of our restless and unhappy England; but what I felt has already been expressed and by so good an Englishman as William Cobbett.

“Now ...  I daresay,” he writes, “that you are a very good Protestant; and I am a monstrous good Protestant too.  We cannot bear the Pope, nor “they there priests that makes men confess there sins and go down upon their marrow-bones before them.”  But let us give the devil his due; and let us not act worse by these Roman Catholics (who by the by were our forefathers) than we are willing to act by the devil himself.  Now then here were a set of monks.  None of them could marry, of course none of them could have wives and families.  They could possess no private property; they could bequeath nothing; they could own nothing but that which they owned in common with the rest of their body.  They could hoard no money; they could save nothing.  Whatever they received as rent for their lands, they must necessarily spend upon the spot, for they never could quit that spot.  They did spend it all upon the spot; they kept all the poor.  Beaulieu and all round about Beaulieu saw no misery, and had never heard the damned name of pauper pronounced as long as those Monks continued.

“You and I are excellent Protestants; you and I have often assisted on the 5th of November to burn Guy Fawkes, the Pope and the Devil.  But you and I would much rather be life holders under Monks than rackrenters....”

St Thomas Aquinas has told us that there were three things for a sight of which he would have endured a year in Purgatory, not unwillingly:  Christ in the flesh, Rome in her flower, and an Apostle disputing.  Christ in the flesh, I would indeed I might have seen, and Rome in her flower were worth even such a price, but for me an Apostle disputing would, let me confess it, have little attraction.  Instead I would that I might see England before the fall, England of the thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth century, England of my heart, with all her great cathedrals still alive, with all her great monasteries still in being, those more than six hundred houses destroyed by Henry, and not least this house of the Cistercians in Beaulieu.  And if I might see that, I should have seen one of the fairest things and the noblest that ever were in the world.