One of the largest examples of Perpendicular Gothic architecture in the West Country, Bath Abbey is a Church of England parish church and former Benedictine monastery. Founded in the 7th century, it was reorganised in the 10th century and rebuilt in the 12th and 16th centuries. The restoration of the cathedral was completed just a few years before the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539.
The medieval abbey church served as a sometime cathedral of a bishop. After long contention between ecclesiastics in the cities of Bath and Wells, the seat of the Diocese of Bath and Wells was later consolidated at Wells Cathedral after the Benedictine community was dissolved in 1539 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Prior Holloway surrendered Bath Priory to the crown in January 1539. It was sold to Humphry Colles of Taunton. The church was stripped of lead, iron and glass and left to decay. Colles sold it to Matthew Colthurst of Wardour Castle in 1543. His son Edmund Colthurst gave the roofless remains of the building to the corporation of Bath in 1572. The corporation had difficulty finding private funds for its restoration.
In 1574, Queen Elizabeth I promoted the restoration of the church, to serve as the grand parish church of Bath. She ordered that a national fund should be set up to finance the work, and in 1583 decreed that it should become the parish church of Bath. James Montague, the Bishop of Bath and Wells from 1608 to 1616, paid £1,000 for a new nave roof of timber lath construction; according to the inscription on his tomb, this was prompted after seeking shelter in the roofless nave during a thunderstorm. He is buried in an alabaster tomb in the north aisle.
During the 1820s and 1830s buildings, including houses, shops and taverns which were very close to or actually touching the walls of the abbey were demolished and the interior remodelled by George Phillips Manners who was the Bath City Architect. Manners erected flying buttresses to the exterior of the nave and added pinnacles to the turrets
The abbey is a Grade I listed building, particularly noted for its fan vaulting. It contains war memorials for the local population and monuments to several notable people, in the form of wall and floor plaques and commemorative stained glass. The church has two organs and a peal of ten bells. The west front includes sculptures of angels climbing to heaven on two stone ladders, representing Jacob's Ladder.
This description incorporates text from the English Wikipedia.
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