 The gate was the entrance to a brewery, the kitchen was a public house, the grounds were used for dancing and fireworks.This condition was the culmination of the abbey's dismantling and sale of material that began in 1541 after its closure by the Dissolution of the Monasteries during the English Reformation.Appalled by the abbey's condition, Alexander Beresford Hope MP (a devoted and wealthy layman) purchased the abbey’s ruins and ground plot in 1844.