The abbey stands a few miles to the south of Chard on the banks of the Axe and Baldwin who was a humble man rose to become the Abbot of Forde and later he rose to become the Bishop of Worcester following Thomas à Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury. Baldwin organised a crusade in 1188 and with King Richard set out on a crusade two years later. Baldwin crowned Richard when he was Archbishop of Canterbury and died from disease which killed many more crusaders in the Holy Land.

Thomas Chard handed the Abbey over to the crown during the dissolution of 1539 and this was the end of a long tradition of 'long labour and constant devotion'. The abbey and its land was then leased to Richard Pollard and during the next century passed into the Poullet, Mallet and Rosewill families. It was then purchased by Edmund Prideux  and he an Inigo Jones transformed it into the Italian style. Cromwell rewared Prixeux with a Baronetcy but he died a year after the work was completed and his son Edmund succeeded him.

Edmund got on well with the Duke of Monmouth and this resulted with him being imprisoned in The Tower for High Treason by he managed to scrape up a ransom of £15,000.

The Abbey then went ot his daughter Margaret in 1702 and she married Francis Gwyn and their descendants lived in the abbey all through the 18th century, when it was leased to Jeremy Bentham for three years.  The Gwyn family finally came to an end in 1864 and the abbey and its contents were sold to a Mr Miles from Bristolk who thten sold it to a Mrs Bertram Evans who left it to her sons and then to her neice when she married Freeman Roper and his son Geoffry lived here for nearly eighty years.

After being rented by Jeremy Bentham it then became home to Mark and Lisa Roper

Today the abbey sit on the banks of the Rive Axe and is surrounded by gardens and lakes, and even though it only opens to the public occassionally, it is well worth a visit and in a 100 year old guide book once described it as

"No one can exceed in beauty and interest Forde Abbey, with its outdoor scenery of folded hills striped up and down with hedges, its green meadows, and rich corn fields, its fruitful orchards, graceful trees, and sparkling waters, and, besides these, the highly cultivated gardens in the immediate vicinity of the house, with all their glories of fruit and flower, fern and foliage."