The Reformation to The Restoration
Henry V111 effectively dissolved the Chertsey Abbey in 1537/8, removing the valuables, and had the lands made over as eventually as Crown Property. The accounts of the Abbey was £659.15 shillings. and 8 pence, 3 farthings per annum. Amounts of stone from the extensive buildings was carted off by barge to the King’s additions to Cardinal Wolsey’s Hampton Court Palace (later built over). Other dressed masonry found its way to Nonsuch Palace (later demolished) at Ewell. Oatlands Palace (later demolished) at Weybridge had some too, and what was left was used to build up the roads in the town.
This painstaking removal of thousands of tons of carefully dressed stone assembled over 400 years would have taken quite a few years to complete. One suspects that the cartage of the manmade quarry would have turned a healthy profit for some Chertsey individuals over a long period. Thomas Cramner drafted the first book of common prayer in 1548 in some of the remaining buildings. But so complete was the destruction that when various noted antiquarians came to the town in the 17th & 18th centuries they found nothing of any significance of the Abbey standing.
The town meanwhile had prospered partly due to the Charter of Queen Elizabeth in 1599 for a market in the town free of fees to the Crown. Moneys taken for market rent would be used for charity to give blankets to the poor at Christmas. This collection and charity work is conducted now as then by an ancient body called the Feeofees who own the original charter inscribed on vellum, together with a magnificent natural bees wax seal with an image of Queen Elizabeth 1st in full Magisterial progress.
Some domestic buildings remaining from about this time are ‘The Olde Olde story’ in Willow Walk, and the three later facaded terraced cottages next to Blacksmiths Lane in London St. ‘Wheelers Green’ in Bitthams Lane on the outskirts of the town is a semi-rare ‘half hall’ house from this era. Abbey Barn was thought to have been built shortly after the dissolution of the Abbey on the outside of the Abbey retaining wall and built for the use of the Abbey removal workers.
Drawing of Willow Walk
Painting of Wheelers Green
Drawing of Abbey Barn
Abraham Cowley the Royalist poet was ‘retired’ to Chertsey after writing some plays lampooning the Restoration Court with whom he was connected. He came to live eventually in Porch House, (Cowley House, now demolished) which was in Guildford Street, just about on the corner of Riversdell Close. 
His move to the town in 1665 was just before the first serious Great Plague deaths were reported in the Covent Garden area where he lived. Cowley was here for two years. He fell out with the noisy townsfolk some of whom let sheep into his garden. He and other Chertsey folk would likely have gone up St Ann’s Hill to watch London burn in the first few days and nights of September 1666. According to one account Abraham Cowley is said to have contracted pneumonia in a hedge somewhere in the now Gogmore Park area on the way home after a night of drinking at his neighbours with his friend Dean Spratt.
He 
died soon afterwards in Porch House and was taken down by boat to Westminster Abbey for burial in 1667. The rebuilt almshouses in Guildford Road were named after him, as are other places in and out of the town. Eldridge’s Bell Foundry ©1560 -1714 was situated up on the Bourne near Steveton Bridge, Guildford St, in sight of Porch House. Such an industry would have required plenty of water.