Malmesbury: A Flying Monk, A Fallen Spire, & England’s Forgotten Capital by Jackie Lambert
Malmesbury, a small, unassuming Wiltshire market town, isn’t the sort of destination most people put on their bucket list.
It’s quaint enough: perched on a hill encircled almost fully by two tributaries of the River Avon, and it has a few distinguishing features. Although it started life as an Iron Age Fort, the ruins of a once-mighty Benedictine abbey now crown the peak, while its 15th-century octagonal market cross looks like a Gothic gazebo on steroids. It’s elaborately carved, and has eight pillars and eight arches holding up a vaulted roof, but no one knows who commissioned it, or who stumped up the cash for it – or why.
But blink, and you’d miss it.
Had it not been a convenient place to stop on our route home, like most, we would have simply passed Malmesbury by.
Yet scratch the surface – or more precisely, get up close and personal with the Abbey’s weathered stones – and you’ll find a town that was once England’s first capital, a centre of learning and pilgrimage, and a stage for war, science, and disaster. A place where hidden histories hide in plain sight.
And as we discovered, it’s also a place where park-ups hide in plain sight.
We were at large in our mighty Beast – the 6 x 4-wheel-drive army lorry we’d converted into our home-on-wheels. Our intended destination had been Mongolia, but coronavirus had trapped us indefinitely within the confines of the UK.
In Malmesbury, a wrong turn further trapped us in a Co-op’s compact parking lot. Unable to enter because of us, a woman thoughtfully abandoned her car on the bend opposite – thus ensuring we had no chance to leave and make room for her. Still, there’s always an upside. While we waited for her to shift, I raced into the shop to buy wine.
Then we followed the signs for long-term parking. This was a smart move, since that was where we wanted to go – contrary to the satnav’s stubborn insistence on routing us to a mystery destination conjured up by its own deranged imaginings.
We left The Beast in a car park by a weir on the river and took the dogs for a run along a nearby footpath. It led to the cricket club, near where my husband, Mark, declared a large gravel area inviting. I pleaded with him not to relocate The Beast.
“Mark, the access is up a steep, unmetalled road, and there are low trees…”
A niggling twinge in my lower back was already registering its objections to six-hours in the passenger seat. You might think being chauffeured at a leisurely pace along scenic country roads sounds relaxing, but think again! They don’t design army trucks around comfort. My pew – a hard wooden bench seat upholstered in mottled green vinyl with neither seatbelt nor suspension – press-gangs my coccyx into the role of a rudimentary seismograph. My rear end presents the first line of detection for every minor tremor. Hit an unexpected pothole or invisible speed ramp, and it catapults me into orbit!
Plus, following the calamitous events of the previous few days, which had involved, among other things, driving up a footpath to the top of a mountain, my adventure cup was very much overflowing.
When Mark agreed, my sigh of relief could have powered the Dogger Bank Wind Farm.
It was a golden October evening, so on a musky carpet of fallen leaves from the tall stately trees that lined the damp, earthy pathway, we clambered upwards to explore the town.
Malmesbury is England’s oldest borough. In the 10th century, Athelstan, Alfred the Great’s grandson and the first king of a unified England, declared it his capital. Reputedly, he is buried within the Abbey, although the 15th-century tomb dedicated to him is empty of relics.
It’s possible his grave was moved to avoid desecration by the Normans, so like Richard III, Athelstan is another lost king.
The footpath led straight to the Abbey, whose arches and pinnacles dominated the skyline. Bathed in late summer sunshine, the whole soaring edifice glowed with the warm ochre hue of intense English mustard. As we dithered about with our four dogs, admiring flying buttresses and the fine Norman carvings on the porticoes that framed the south porch, a chap passing by with a plastic bag full of shopping stopped to ask if we were okay.
When we said we were just having a look around, he introduced himself as Mike and treated us to an impromptu tour!
“The Abbey used to be twice this size,” Malmesbury’s proud resident revealed, “and it had the highest steeple in Europe. It was over 430 ft (130 m), which is 23 ft (7 m) taller than Salisbury Cathedral’s. That’s really something, because Salisbury is still the UK’s tallest!
“But around 1500, a thunderstorm brought it down. They say the lightning bolt instantly turned water in the stone to steam, so the masonry beneath the wooden steeple literally exploded. The collapse took half the building with it. Local lore claims the golden ball from the top rolled down the high street as far as the George Inn!”
He gestured toward a lone church spire across the road. “That’s all that’s left of St. Paul’s parish church. After Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, the Abbey became the main place of worship. It’s still the parish church today.
“So Malmesbury is very curious. It has an abbey with no steeple facing a steeple with no church!”
I remembered that St. Mary’s, the church at our last stop in Painswick had lost her spire to a lightning strike in 1883, but that wasn’t all the two towns had in common. Mike beckoned us toward the smooth stonework of the south face and pointed out the most fascinating feature of all. One we could so easily have missed.
“Do you see all these dings and pockmarks? They were made by musket balls. Malmesbury was a Cavalier (Royalist) stronghold during the English Civil War, but fighting was fierce. Between 1644 and 1646, the town changed hands seven times. The resisting forces used the Abbey as a fortress. They mounted a cannon on the west tower and fired down Abbey Row. The west tower is no longer there. It collapsed eventually, perhaps due to battle damage.
“When Malmesbury finally fell, they say the victors lined up the leaders of the resistance against the Abbey walls and executed them by firing squad.”
We looked at the pattern of the musket fire. A neat constellation in one area certainly suggested something more than random crossfire. I shivered as I ran my hand over the scarred stone, humbled by the dead weight of events that took place there. Under my fingers was another ghostly reminder of how bitterly our nation once fought over its future, and how those brutal struggles shaped the identity of the country we know today.
Just before Mike left, he shared his final gem of neighbourhood trivia.
“Malmesbury is where the first person in Britain was killed by a tiger!”
This immediately piqued my interest. One of my dubious claims to fame is that I was once bitten by a tiger!
“Hannah Twynnoy was a barmaid in a local pub. In 1703, a travelling menagerie pitched up in the pub yard.”
I had to suppress a giggle when Mike revealed the name of the tavern.
“It was The White Lion…”
It seems Hannah wasn’t an entirely innocent party in the tiger coming to tea. A plaque, now lost, recorded that despite ‘repeated remonstrance from its keeper’, she ‘imprudently took pleasure’ in tormenting the tiger. Of course, the day came when she enraged the beast so much, it broke free and turned her into the country’s first human tiger tucker.
Who paid for Hannah’s gravestone is an enduring mystery. It was unusual for any female – never mind a serving girl – to be given a lasting memorial. However, a stone in the Abbey grounds, engraved with a lyrical epitaph, still commemorates Hannah’s passing:
In bloom of life
She’s snatched from hence
She had no room
To make defence
For Tyger fierce
Took life away
And here she lies in a bed of clay
Until the Resurrection Day.
In contrast, the parish register sums up her demise with such deadpan brevity it is almost funny: “Hannah Twynney kild by a Tygre at ye White Lyon.”
For me, this conjured up Ogden Nash’s poem, The Panther, which in six lines, offers short, sweet, and sound advice on managing interactions with ferocious felines. Since that remains under copyright – and I don’t want to fling a third genus into Malmesbury’s minestrone of lily-toned lions and testy tigers – I have penned my own parody as a warning against messing with the stripey species:
If Malmesbury’s tiger bares his fang,
You’ll have no time to utter ‘dang!’
And should the tiger proffer tea,
Decline with haste – and promptly flee!
For if you answer the tiger’s call,
You likely won’t come back at all…
Malmesbury has long been somewhere that people push their luck with the forces of nature. We know this because William of Malmesbury – the renowned medieval historian – recorded the exploits of his contemporary, Brother Eilmer, in his Gesta Regum Anglorum (Deeds of English Kings).
William records how Eilmer prophesied the Norman invasion of England when he saw Halley’s Comet in 1066. He quotes Eilmer as saying, “I see you brandishing the downfall of my country.”
He goes on to describe William the Conqueror as a person of ‘extraordinary corpulence’, bald of brow, with a fierce countenance, and so strong that on horseback at full gallop, he could bend a bow that no one else could draw.
Yet, divining an event that would reshape English history wasn’t Eilmer’s most memorable feat.
The Abbey’s great library placed Malmesbury among medieval Europe’s foremost intellectual centres. Malmesbury’s William described Eilmer as ‘a man learned for those times.’ It was doubtless here, among musty scrolls and heavy, leather-bound tomes, that Eilmer first read the Greek myth of Daedalus and his son, Icarus. Imprisoned in a tower by King Minos of Crete, Daedalus fashioned wings of feathers and wax to facilitate their escape. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too high, but Icarus ignored his father’s advice. Overcome with the joy of flight, Icarus flew too close to the sun. The heat melted his waxen wings, and he plummeted into the sea and drowned.
Inspired by airborne dreams, Eilmer decided to emulate Daedalus.
He strapped makeshift wings to his hands and feet and, sometime around the year 1000, enacted one of the earliest recorded attempts at human flight. He hurled himself from the Abbey tower and, miraculously, soared for ‘more than a furlong’ (660 ft or 200 m). He crash-landed and broke both legs – but in the process, earned his wings and immortality – a millennium after his heroic attempt, we still remember Eilmer, ‘The Flying Monk.’
“I forgot to provide myself a tail,” he noted later, with casual understatement. Modern aerodynamic studies confirm that Eilmer’s analysis of his failure was bang on – a tail would certainly have helped to stabilise his flight, but the Abbot forbade any further attempts to reach for the sky.
Despite being ‘lame ever after’, at least Eilmer survived to tell the tale, proving that in Malmesbury, curiosity doesn’t always kill you – but the cat might.
***
These days, Malmesbury’s White Lion pub is a private residence, and the George Inn is a veterinary practice. Make of that what you will!
Malmesbury is also home to The Old Bell Hotel on Abbey Row, just outside the Abbey’s west end. England's oldest purpose-built hotel, it was established in 1220 as a guest house for Malmesbury Abbey. It was built on the foundations of Malmesbury Castle, which was destroyed in 1216, which explains why, prior to 1798, it was called The Castle Inn. King Henry II and his future Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, once stayed at Malmesbury Castle.
When the Abbey was dissolved in 1539, the inn continued to welcome guests, including many royals. King Edward IV lodged at the inn on his way to the Battle of Tewkesbury, a key battle in the Wars of the Roses, which took place on 4th May 1471.
As such, The Old Bell has been in continuous use for over 800 years.
This is a modified excerpt of a chapter from Jacqueline’s upcoming book, More Manchester Than Mongolia: An Unexpected Road Trip Through Back Road Britain, due for publication towards the end of 2025.
Malmesbury Abbey - a church without a spire
Malmesbury.market.cross.arp Arpingstone,
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons 
Malmesbury Abbey - one of England's finest
Norman doorways 
Malmesbury's spire without a church & exquisite
Norman carvings 
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Malmesbury's arches and pinnacles dominate the skyline. You can see the flying buttresses here too
Hannah_Twynnoy's_gravestone Greenshed,
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons 
Malmesbury Abbey Ruins
Musket damage in Malmesbury Abbey stonework
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The Old Bell Inn Malmesbury
- England's oldest hotel whose foundations date to 1220, in continuous use for 800 years 
Jackie, Mark, Beast & Fab Four courtesy of @Liveration
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The tiger who bit ME!
Author Jacqueline Lambert - with her award winning travel memoirs about overland travel with dogs
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