Boxley Abbey

Boxley Abbey in Boxley, Kent, England was a Cistercian monastery founded c.1146 by William of Ypres, leader of King Stephen's Flemish mercenaries, and colonised by monks from Clairvaux Abbey in France. Some of its ruins survive, some four miles north-east of Maidstone.

In 1171, the then abbot was one of those responsible for the burial of the murdered archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. In 1193 the abbots of Boxley and Robertsbridge journeyed to the continent to search for King Richard I, finally locating him in Bavaria. During 1512-13, the abbot appealed to the crown to arrest four of the monks, accusing them of rebelliousness.

The abbey was famous, and later infamous, for a relic known as the Rood of Grace, a wooden cross, the figure upon which was supposed to miraculously move and speak. In 1538 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries one Geoffrey Chamber, a "commissioner" employed by Thomas Cromwell to oversee the closure of the institution, examined the famed relic and discovered it to be a fake, observing the levers and wires that enacted the so-called miracles. The rood was taken down and displayed in Maidstone market so as to demonstrate the fraud. Finally, it was sent to London and with the accompaniment of a sermon from the Bishop of Rochester it was hacked to pieces and burnt. There is no evidence that any miracles were ever associated with the moving image, notwithstanding the monks' practice of infiltrating hired imposters into the throng to celebrate the supposed cures. However, the presence of wires and levers in themselves does not constitute fraud; theatrical historian Leanne Groeneveld contends that this "puppetry" was presented as a theatrical show to a fully cognisant audience.

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