Byland Abbey

Posted on July 23, 2015 by JuliaH

In 1135 twelve monks left Furness Abbey to found a daughter house. Their leader was Abbot Gerald and their destination was Calder Abbey. Sadly their neighbours, the Scots, proved rather rowdy. Three years later Abbot Gerald and his little band returned to Furness. Gerald had no intention of stopping being an abbot so he and his followers were refused admittance.

Impoverished and homeless the monks set off for York believing that they might gain some help from Thurstan, Archbishop of York. Footsore and weary the little band arrived in Thirsk – some twenty miles short of their destination. In Thirsk they met Lady Gundreda de Mowbray who took a shine to the monastic posse. She suggested that the monks go to Hood at the foot of Sutton Bank. Her uncle, she explained, had a jolly nice cave that they could use. His name was Robert d’Alney and he had been a monk at Whitby but had left to become a hermit. Clearly she’d forgotten that hermits like their own company. In any event Gerald and his monks joined Robert on the understanding that as soon as Gundreda’s son was of age that he would endow a monastery for them.

Gerald took the opportunity to travel to Savigny where the monks from Furness Abbey originated. He negotiated the new abbey’s independence from Furness. The abbey which he would build would not be a daughter house. It would be independent. Gerald, parchment of independence in hand hurried home – where he promptly died.

Robert d’Alney clearly wasn’t cut out to be a hermit because having shared his cave with the monks not only did he throw in his lot with them he became their next abbot. He would remain in charge for the next fifty-four years.

Robert’s great-nephew, Roger de Mowbray, now come into his inheritance, gave the monks land at Old Byland. Unfortunately the new monastery was too close to the abbey at Rievaulx. This in itself wouldn’t have been a problem. The difficulty lay in the fact that the monks kept slightly different hours. The bells of one abbey interrupted the services of the other. The monks of Old Byland who’d only been there a year moved once more in 1147 to more land provided by Roger de Mowbray.

By 1150 Byland had a reputation equal to that of Rievaulx and Fountains. It was at this point that the abbot of Furness Abbey tried to reassert the authority of Furness over Byland- presumably the abbot had his eye on reflected glory and lots of loot. By this time the Savignac monks had merged with the Cistercians. The case was sent to Aelred of Rievaulx for judgement. Aelred ruled that his neighbours were independent. It probably helped that Abbot Aelred was friends with the abbot of Byland at that time.

If internal political wrangles weren’t bad enough the monks of Byland (they moved the name with them) also had to drain marshes and cope with those rowdy Scots. In 1322 the rather disastrous King Edward II spent the night at Byland Abbey. His army was firmly trounced by the Scots and he fled to York on hearing the news, leaving the monks to face the victors of the battle who were intent on a spot of pillage.

History darkened Bylands door once more in 1536 when Cromwell sent his commissioners to survey all the monasteries. Byland had an income of £295. In addition to the abbot there were twenty-five choir monks. According to Page, “The abbey received, it is not known why, Letters Patent dated 30 January 1537, to continue, but it surrendered 30 Henry VIII, when pensions were granted to the abbot (£50) and twenty-three monks; one other, John Harryson, received no money pension quia habet vicariam de Byland.” The ink well thought to have been used at the signing of the surrender can be seen in the museum attached to the abbey ruins.

Today the ruins, in the care of English Heritage, are set in a tranquil vale on the edge of Sutton Bank. The church, which follows the basic Cistercian floor plan is cross shape. It’s majesty lies on its West Front with the ruins of what was once a glorious rose window. By the time the monks of Byland built their church the Cistercians were moving away from the austerity of their early years. It must have been a magnificent building with its symmetric green and white tiles. Tiles from Byland Abbey are on display in the British Museum as well as being found in situ. Click on the image of the circular pattern of tiles to the right to open up a photograph of the British Museum tiles in a new page.

The size of the church reflects the two groups of monks that populated Cistercian monasteries. The choir monks were literate and spent most of their time in prayer and reflection. They used the east end of the church. Unlike the Benedictines who used tenant farmers and servants the Cistercians used a second tier of monks. Lay brothers took monastic vows but their role was that of labour. For them there were simplified services at the beginning and the end of the day. They learned their prayers and they were not permitted to learn to read or write. The lay brothers used the west part of the church.

The two groups of monks remained separate not only in their worship but also in their quarters. Cistercian monasteries follow a different pattern to Benedictine establishments. The huge cloister was at the heart of the monastery. The choir monks had their quarters to the east. This range of buildings included a first floor dormitory with a staircase leading into the south transept of the church facilitating the night services. The south range of the cloister housed the kitchens and the refectory whilst the west range was home to the lay brothers. Like the choir monks they had their own reredorter (monastic toilet block).

Harrison, Stuart A. Byland Abbey. London: English Heritage

‘Houses of Cistercian monks: Byland’, in A History of the County of York: Volume 3, ed. William Page (London, 1974), pp. 131-134 http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/yorks/vol3/pp131-134 [accessed 22 July 2015].

Medieval Monastic Orders- part I

Posted on June 14, 2015 by JuliaH

During the later Anglo-Saxon period all monasteries were Benedictine. Benedictine monks follow the rules written by St Benedict in the early sixth century (535-540) for his monastic foundation at Monte Cassino. The rule covers what monks are and aren’t allowed to do as well as regulating their days and nights with regard to Divine worship, study, manual labour and prayer. However, as the medieval period went on many monks, such as the Benedictine in the manuscript image to the left of this paragraph developed a reputation for behaving in a decidedly unmonastic manner.

By the eleventh century, Cluny Abbey, which followed the rules of St Benedict, as indeed did every monastic order that followed, chose to reinterpret the rules. The order applied itself to the liturgy rather than educational and intellectual work expanded. In England, William Warenne founded the Cluniac abbey at Lewes just after the conquest. William the Conqueror requested more Cluniac monks to come from their mother abbey in Cluny to England but was unsuccssessful in the first instance. Gradually though more Cluniacs did arrive. William Rufus, not known for his piety, encouraged the Cluniacs to come to England as did his brother King Henry I who funded Reading Abbey which interestingly was inhabited initially by Cluniac monks but did not go on to become a Cluniac establishment. The royal family continued to support the Cluniac order. King Stephen founded the Cluniac priory at Faversham which became notable as the burial place for his family. In Yorkshire Pontefract was a Cluniac establishment. Despite this early popularity the Cluniacs did not prosper as an order in England as the centuries progressed not least because all Cluniac houses were daughter houses following the rule and direction of the mother-house in Cluny and thus aliens. Whilst the Plantagenets held a huge European empire it wasn’t a problem but as English monarchs found the size of their continental domains dwindling they didn’t want monks who looked to Europe for direction and preferred to sponsor home-grown talent.

The Cistericans, pictured left, were founded in 1098 by the monks of Citeaux who believed in austerity and hard work – again a reinterpretation of the rule of St Benedict and reforms designed to counter perceived laxity in other monastic houses. Their habit was made from unbleached wool. These were the so-called ‘White monks.’ They arrived in the south of England in 1128. In 1132 Walter Espec gave the white monks land at Rievaulx – the rest as they say, is history. Fountains Abbey is also a Cistercian foundation. Unlike the standard Benedictine monks they refused gifts and rights of patronage – in short anything that would have made them easily wealthy. Instead they cultivated the wilderness. An emphasis was placed upon labour. The great Yorkshire abbeys acquired land and farms over the next two hundred years extending south into Derbyshire and north into Cumberland. In 1147 Furness Abbey was founded. At that time Furness was in Lancashire rather than Cumbria as it is in present times.

The next influx of monastic types were the Charterhouse monks or Carthusians as they should be more properly named. This order was developed by the monks of Chartreuse. The first monastic foundations for this order were in Somerset at the turn of the twelfth century. They lived in isolation. Each monk had a cell and a cloistered garden. They did not see one another, even for Divine service as each stall was screened – together but alone. They arrived during the reign of King Henry II as part of the monarch’s penance for the death of Thomas Becket. The Carthusians restricted the numbers of monks in each priory to 13 monks composed of a prior and twelve monks and eighteen lay brothers. There was a vow of silence and they were vegetarians. The order did not really take off until the fourteenth century by which time monasticism was suffering on account of the Black Death: changing economy and social structures. In Yorkshire the Carthusians established Mount Grace Priory in 1398. Today its ruins remain the best preserved Carthusian monastery in England. The seated Carthusian on the right is an early eighteenth century portrayal and can be found in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Of these orders only the Carthusians do not have nuns as well as monks.

So far, so good. Part two of Medieval Monastic orders will cover the canons and part three will cover friars.

Calder Abbey – or a false start

Posted on January 8, 2015 by JuliaH

In 1135 twelve monks and a newly minted abbot called Gerold left Furness Abbey to found a daughter house at Calder near Egremont. The land had been donated by Ranulf Meschin but he doesn’t appear to have endowed the new abbey with an estate sufficient to thrive. Even more unfortunately for the Savignac monks of the newly founded Calder Abbey, England was just about to erupt into civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda.

King Henry I had twenty-two children of whom twenty were illegitimate. He had only one legitimate son and he drowned when the White Ship sank in 1120. Henry made the leading barons swear to accept his daughter Matilda as their queen but they had their fingers crossed. As soon as Henry departed this life Matilda’s cousin Stephen of Blois snaffled the crown. The next nineteen years when ‘Christ and his apostles slept’ were not a good time to be founding anything far less an abbey a stone’s throw from the Scottish border. The Scots sensing that the English might be distracted took the opportunity to invade most of Cumberland and claim it for themselves. This seems to have involved burning large chunks of it to the ground.

Within three years of its foundation, thanks to Scottish raids, Calder Abbey was on its knees. The twelve monks and their abbot set off back to Furness. Now, this is where accounts differ. In the first version of the story Gerold rather liked being an abbot and refused to stop being one even though he didn’t have an abbey anymore. In the second version Furness Abbey had founded a daughter house (Calder Abbey) to rid itself of a little band of trouble makers. It had no intention of letting them back in again even if the Scots had burned their home.

Whatever the truth, Gerold and his twelve footsore monks set off on their travels once more. Their intent was to go to York and present their case to Archbishop Thurston. However, on arrival at Thirsk they met the mother of Roger Mowbray who suggested a nice location at Hood where another relation of hers was busy being a hermit (perhaps she hadn’t spotted the fact that hermits like being on their own and that thirteen additions would rather ruin the solitude).

The monks settled down in their new Yorkshire home but as they hadn’t been made to feel very welcome by their brothers back in Cumberland they decided that they wanted to free themselves from the jurisdiction of Furness. This happened in 1142 but not before Gerold had made a trip to the Savignac head office at Savigny to present his case.

Hood proved to be an unsuitable location for a monastery so in 1143 the brothers moved again, this time to Byland. Unfortunately they failed to notice that Rievaulx Abbey was right on the doorstep. The two abbeys were so close that they could hear each other’s bells which would not have been a problem had they been keeping to the same schedule but unfortunately they weren’t. The refugees from Calder were forced to move for a third time and on this occasion the monastic community we know as Byland Abbey thrived.

The abbey at Furness and later the abbey at Calder continued to try to claim superiority over the monks of Byland despite the fact that Gerold had been released from his allegiance to Furness and that Calder Abbey hadn’t really existed until 1143 when Furness Abbey made a second attempt at building a daughter house on the land given to them by Ranulf Meschin.

(The picture is of Byland Abbey. Calder Abbey is not currently open to the public.)