Henry VIII Dissolved This Abbey. They Refused to Leave for 500 Years.

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

Heather Teysko

History

4.6 • 624 Ratings

🗓️ 23 March 2026

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Syon Abbey was founded in 1415 and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539. The community refused to scatter. They waited, came back under Mary, went into exile again under Elizabeth, survived a Calvinist mob in Flanders, 200 years in Lisbon, a 9.0 earthquake, and Napoleon. They finally closed in 2011 -- not because anyone shut them down, but because there were three elderly nuns left and they couldn't maintain the building. This is their story, including the nun who grabbed the abbey seal to stop Henry's officers, the abbess who confronted a mob and died six weeks later, and a community that carried the keys to their original home for 366 years. 👕 The "Sturdy Dame and a Wilful" t-shirt is here: https://tudorfair.com/products/a-sturdy-dame-and-a-wilful-unisex-t-shirt Agnes Smythe would have wanted you to have it. 📚 Sources and further reading: Virginia Bainbridge, "Nuns on the Run: The Sturdy and Wilful Dames of Syon Abbey and their Disobedience to the Tudor State ca. 1530-1600" -- this is the research that recovered the three incidents of nun resistance and is genuinely worth tracking down. The University of Exeter Special Collections has the entire Syon Abbey archive online and it is a wonderful rabbit hole: https://specialcollectionsarchive.exeter.ac.uk/exhibits/show/syon-abbey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Now, are all the traitors present?
0:02.5	Let's get started, shall we?
0:04.5	From rags to riches.
0:05.8	I'm so sick of this.
0:07.0	Working like a dog and being treated worse.
0:09.1	Yorkshire to New York.
0:10.7	Poor climbers, you and me.
0:12.4	A life dedicated to revenge.
0:14.4	Let's make this an occasion to remember.
0:16.9	A woman of substance on Channel 4, stream now.
0:19.8	So last week, we talked about what happened to nuns after the disillusion of the monasteries,
0:26.8	what their lives looked like, where they went, how they survived.
0:30.1	And we talked about Cyan Abbey.
0:32.2	And I mentioned that it probably deserved its own episode because what happened there
0:37.2	is just a completely
0:38.6	different story from everything else. And so many of you commented and wrote back saying,
0:43.9	yes, please do Sion Abbey. We want to hear about it. So I put together some research notes,
0:48.4	and here we are. This one is for you. So here's the fact that I keep turning over in my head as I'm reading about this and I can't get past.
0:57.2	There was a community of English nuns that survived Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries.
1:03.1	They survived Edward the 6th. They came home under Mary, then they got dissolved again under Elizabeth, and they went back into exile.
1:10.7	They survived a Calvinist
1:12.3	mob breaking into their monastery. They survived the French Revolution. They survived Napoleon.
	...

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