The Templars added to Denny’s possessions, and in the mid 13th century acquired the income from the nearby parish church at Great Wilbraham explicitly for the care of infirm members of the order housed at Denny. Other patrons included Henry III, who in 1244 sent a barrel of wine to the preceptory. Clearly Denny’s benefactors included the highest in the land.

The beautifully carved capitals on the doorway at the west front of the church date to the late 12th century, when the Templars were adapting the building for their use. They also added a stone-built chamber to the south-west of the entrance, possibly as a residence for the chaplain who celebrated Mass for the community.

The Templars would also have used the pre-existing Benedictine dormitory, where the brethren slept, and refectory, used for communal dining. The location of these buildings has yet to be firmly determined.

An inventory made in 1308 reveals that the community at Denny lived austerely. There were 11 beds in the dormitory, and the furnishing of the refectory consisted of little more than benches and tables. There were three silver chalices in the church; together with vestments and books, these were used to celebrate the Mass. The preceptory had an annual income of about £66, about what would be expected for a small to mid-ranking monastery.

The Poor Clares

The ownership of Denny, like other Templar properties, was transferred to the Knights Hospitaller, another military order. They made no use of the site, which in 1324 reverted to the Crown. Three years later, the king granted Denny in perpetuity to Mary de Valence (c.1304–77), the rich widow of Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke. It was she who established the third and final religious community at Denny.

The early history of the nunnery is intimately related to the community of Poor Clares (Franciscan nuns) at nearby Waterbeach, founded in 1294 by Dionysia de Munchensey. She died in 1314 and bequeathed many of her properties, including patronage of the Waterbeach nunnery, to her kinswoman Mary de Valence.

The nunnery at Waterbeach had been built on a site liable to flooding. In 1339, Mary secured permission to migrate the community to Denny. The first nuns arrived in 1342, though opposition to the move among the nuns at Waterbeach meant that the process was not completed until 1351.

The Poor Clares took their name from St Clare (d.1253), a close friend of St Francis of Assisi (d.1226). Wearing grey-brown habits, they lived an austere, strictly enclosed life that revolved around the communal chanting of religious services in their church. Only three monasteries of Poor Clares were founded in England, all with the support of noble benefactors.

In 1741, an Act of Parliament was passed for the drainage of the fens (marshland) near the abbey, creating swathes of new prime agricultural land. The full potential of this was realised by Robert Moyse, tenant of the farm in the early 19th century. In 1828 the author of a treatise on the cultivation of mangel-wurzel (a beet-like root vegetable) described him as ‘a gentleman of great practical knowledge of farming’, and praised Denny Abbey Farm as ‘a specimen of that agricultural judgement and knowledge so requisite and necessary to an English farmer’.

In 1946 Denny came into the hands of Pembroke College, Cambridge. The following year the college transferred the site to the Ministry of Works, a predecessor of English Heritage, though it remained a tenanted farm until the 1960s.

In the late 1960s parts of the then vacant farmhouse were dismantled to reveal evidence of its building phases between the mid 12th and 19th centuries – an intrusive intervention that left few of the farmhouse features intact. Some other later farm buildings were also demolished.

The neighbouring Farmland Museum, which acquired the remaining farm buildings in the mid 1990s, now manages Denny Abbey on behalf of English Heritage. The museum displays vividly evoke the rhythms, practicalities and hardships of agricultural life in Cambridgeshire in bygone ages.