Galilee Porch

DSCN3945-2Many medieval Cistercian churches were entered through something called a galilee or ‘paradise’. It was a porch (it’s sometimes also called a narthex because why have one word when there’re are so many available to bother and bewilder the casual lover of monastic ruins) situated on the west front of the church. It was an important starting point for religious processions into the church. It was also a popular place for patrons to be buried. In Rievaulx there are the remains of eight graves in the galilee. There was often also a smaller altar. The galilee porch at Tintern Abbey was said to house  a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary.

In Cistercian monasteries there was initially no place for lay visitors in the church during canonical hours and mass but it was recognised that visitors should be admitted on very holy days such as Easter, though historians are unclear where the guests sat once they were inside the church. The other thing to be remembered is that these guests were largely male as Cistercians took a dim view of women entering their precincts although they did provide hospitality to noble guests outside the abbey.

These days it isn’t just monasteries and cathedrals that have galilee porches. A number of parish churches have them as well and in my perusing of the Internet I discovered that the reason the porch is called a galilee- allegedly- is because the Corpus Christi procession finished in the porch at the point where Christ leads the disciples after his resurrection into galilee http://www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/zgalilee.htm (accessed 8th July 2015 at 18.00) The writer of the aforementioned website places the blame for the name squarely on the Victorians.

Chapter Houses

DSCN3977-2The chapter house was the second most important building in the monastery range after the church. It was here that the monks met every day to discuss abbey business and to listen to a chapter from the Rule of St Benedict. The monks sat on stone benches around the walls as shown in the first picture showing the ruins of the chapter house at Rievaulx.  It was here also that punishments were metered out to erring monks, important visitors greeted and Visitations conducted.  It was here also that the abbots and monks of monasteries across the land surrendered their properties into the hands of Cromwell’s agents.

Burton and Kerr (page 80) emphasise how unusual the chapter house is at Rievaulx. Instead of being rectangular it has an apse (semi-circular end).  It was also large enough to accommodate the lay brothers as well as the choir monks. The chapter house was built during the time of Abbot Aelred  (abbot -1147-1167) but the shrine to Sir William of Rievaulx who was Aelred’s predecessor can still be seen behind a window of the chapter house.

Indeed in the earlier chapter houses it is perfectly normal to find the tombs of  abbots as well as pavements bearing reference to patrons, even tombs of patrons in some cases.  On a more prosaic level in Cistercian chapter houses libraries in the form of book cupboards built into the walls can also be found.

IMG_4456As with much else about monasteries the chapter house changed according to the period in which it was built. Early chapter houses are rectangular ground floor affairs beneath the dormitory but they became increasingly ornate as the medieval period advanced. The chapter house became a separate vaulted building, some with apses and others, which took on a polygon shape- sometimes the original rectangular chapter house became an outer room leading to the chapter house which projected out of the east range.  Many chapter houses are separate from the church, with a slype or alleyway between the church and the chapter house but in other places, such as Chester the chapter house adjoins the church.  Some chapter houses such as the ones at Southwell are heavily decorated.  In Southwell it’s possible to spend hours in the chapter house looking for green men.  Foliate heads of all sizes peer at you from the masonry where as at Wells, as the two photographs in this paragraph show, the vaulted ceiling and lantern of glasswork will have you craning your neck. IMG_4455

Burton, Janet and Kerr, Julie (2011) The Cistercians in the Middle Ages (Monastic Orders). Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer,

Calder Abbey – or a false start

DSCN3786-2In 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.)

 

 

Cleeve Abbey

Cleeve Abbey TileCleeve Abbey was a Cistercian foundation.  Cistercians were initially an order of Benedictine monks who felt that the rule of St Benedict had slackened over time. A group of these reformers founded the abbey at Citeaux in 1098. They placed emphasis upon prayer, manual labour, austerity and poverty.

 

The Cistercians or White Monks, named after their undyed rough woolen habits came to England in 1132. They arrived from Clairvaux in order to establish a ‘daughter house’ to the abbey in Clairvaux.  The abbot and his twelve companions (the usual number for a new daughter house) journeyed north until they arrived at the River Rye.

Rievaulx Abbey would become one of the greatest abbeys in the country founding daughter houses of its own in England and Scotland.  Patrons of Rievaulx included kings of England and Scotland. Little wonder that they began with twelve choir monks but exceeded one hundred and fifty less than a century later. Much of this expansion was due to the influence one of Rievaulx’s abbots – a monk called Aelred who later became a saint.

 

Rievaulx’s own daughter houses can be found north and south of the border between England and Scotland. Melrose Abbey in Scotland was a daughter house, as were Warden Abbey in Bedfordshire, Revesby in Lincolnshire and Rufford Abbey in Nottinghamshire. A second abbey was founded in Scotland – Dundrennan.

 

Each of these abbeys in their own turn founded daughter houses; grand-daughter houses to Rievaulx. For example Melrose Abbey is the mother house of Hulm Cultram Abbey in Cumbria. In England, Revesby Abbey created a daughter house in Somerset – Cleeve Abbey to be precise – so you can take a blogger out of Yorkshire but you can’t take Yorkshire out of the blog for very long as I discovered this morning.

 

Having listened to the aftermath of Hurricane Bertha pass overhead in the night in the form of a heavy downpour and a thunderstorm we ventured coastwards to Cleeve Abbey in Washford with our fingers firmly crossed that we would avoid any rain.

 

The information that follows comes from the very informative display at the beginning of the tour and the ever helpful Victoria County History.

 

The 3rd Earl of Lincoln, William de Roumare,  was the founder of the monastery in the late twelfth century when abbey building was at its peak. His own grandfather had been one of the patrons who founded Revesby.

The abbey was known as Vallis Florida meaning ‘flowering valley’ – it still does have plenty of flowers.

 

The first abbot was called Ralph. He and twelve monks arrived from Revesby to found the only Cistercian abbey in Somerset. It was never wealthy but by 1300 there were twenty-eight monks. In the years that followed monks from this picturesque community toiled on the land, studied (rather than the usual cupboard of books, the brothers at Cleeve had an entire room of them) and a couple were even raised to the rank of papal chaplain.

And so things might have continued but Henry VIII was a man in need of a son. In Autumn 1535 Thomas Cromwell’s commissioners came knocking on the gatehouse door. The man of the moment was Dr John Tregonwell. He liked what he saw –even if it was only worth in the region of £155 a year- in fact he liked it so much that he wrote a politely worded note to Cromwell asking if he could rent it as he had a wife and children to support. Given that the monastery hadn’t even been dissolved his request seems to be ‘a bit previous’ as my step-son would say.

 

The plot thickened as there’s also a letter in existence dated 1537 written by Sir Thomas Arundell, the king’s receiver who was writing to ask what Cromwell intended with Cleeve as it was still operational and rumour said that King Henry VIII had ‘pardoned it.” He went on to ask for clarification and to comment that Cleeve contained “seventeen priests of honest life.”

It was to no avail. The abbey was required to submit. The abbot received a pension of 40 marks a year (about £9000 these days apparently). One of the monks – John Hooper- went on to become Bishop of Gloucester. He managed to irritate Queen Mary in 1555 and was burned as a heretic.

 

Tregonwell was not successful in his suit. Still, there were plenty of other abbeys for him to lay hands upon. He acquired Milton Abbas in 1540 and numerous other Dorset properties. According to his parliamentary biography there appears to have been some irregularity about the number of leases he handed over for the nunnery of St Giles at Flamstead which must have been resolved and not to his credit. He went on to become Chancellor of Wells Cathedral and later,  during the reign of Queen Mary, the MP for Scarborough.

As for Cleeve Abbey itself, it was granted in January 1538 to Robert Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex by way of a thank you present.

Radcliffe was a loyal servant to the Tudors. He was the privy councilor who suggested that Henry Fitzroy, Henry VIII’s illegitimate son with Bessie Blount, should be named heir to the crown ahead of the legitimate but female Mary. He was an active agent in promoting Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and later after the suppression of the minor monasteries he helped to put down the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) in Lancashire.

 

The church of Cleeve Abbey was swiftly demolished but the cloister remains as do many lovely, if cracked thirteenth century floor tiles, which lay hidden beneath the soil for many centuries. The display in the abbey buildings includes tiles showing Richard the Lionheart and Saladin on horseback. The display also explains how the tiles were made.  Other tiles are heraldic and reflect the names of the abbey’s patrons including Richard of Cornwall who was the brother of  Henry III.  His tiles are the ones with the lion rampant on them.

Henry III was also a patron.  He gave the monks of Cleeve Abbey the right to any wrecks that arrived on Cleeve’s stretch of shoreline.