Rievaulx Abbey

Interesting facts

To make room for their buildings in the narrow valley, the monks diverted the River Rye twice during the twelfth century.

Roof lead cast into royal-stamped ingots at the Dissolution lay forgotten on site until the 20th century, when some was reused in York Minster's Five Sisters window.

After the Black Death the community collapsed: by 1381 only the abbot, 14 choir monks and three lay brothers remained.

At the Dissolution the royal commissioners counted 72 buildings on the site, served by 102 lay employees.

In the 1750s Thomas Duncombe III built Rievaulx Terrace on the hillside above, with two Grecian-style temples looking down on the ruins.

Ailred himself was buried in the abbey, as were members of the powerful de Ros family, lords of nearby Helmsley.

The ruins became a scheduled ancient monument in 1915 and passed into the care of the state two years later.

Over time the abbey gathered land grants amounting to around 6,000 acres.

Why it is worth it

Walter Espec, lord of nearby Helmsley, gave the land, and in March 1132 a party of twelve monks sent from Bernard of Clairvaux's own abbey in Burgundy founded Rievaulx — only the second Cistercian house established in England, and the first north of the Trent. Archbishop Thurstan of York backed the plan, and the first abbot, William, wasted no time turning Rievaulx into a mission base of its own, sending out colonies of monks to found daughter houses at Warden, Melrose, Dundrennan and Revesby within little more than a decade.

The abbey's real transformation came under Ailred, who had joined as a young monk soon after the foundation and became abbot in 1147. Ailred was no provincial figure — he had served in the household of the Scottish king before taking the habit — and under him Rievaulx grew into one of the intellectual centres of English monasticism as much as a religious one; his writings on friendship and on Anglo-Saxon history were read well beyond Yorkshire. By his death in 1167 the community had swollen to some 140 choir monks and roughly 500 lay brothers, a population that made Rievaulx, briefly, one of the largest single monastic communities anywhere in Europe.

Feeding a community that size took a serious economy. Rievaulx ran extensive sheep pastures across the North York Moors for the wool trade, and — less typically for a Cistercian house — operated an ironworks with a water-powered forge on site. The chapter house built under Ailred used a design that, unusually, was never copied by any other Cistercian community, a mark of how much latitude the abbey had earned by then.

Rievaulx surrendered on 3 December 1538, one of the last waves of Henry VIII's dissolution, its community down to just twenty-three monks by then. The site's industrial afterlife outlasted its religious one: the new owner, Thomas Manners, Earl of Rutland, expanded the ironworking the monks had started, and by 1545 the works fed four furnaces; a blast furnace added in 1577 may have been the first of its kind anywhere in the north of England.

Good to know

Scheduled monument.

Getting there

31 km from Guisborough. Teesside International Airport (MME) is about 35 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Rievaulx Abbey was a Cistercian abbey in Rievaulx, near Helmsley, in the North York Moors National Park, North Yorkshire, England. It was one of the great monasteries in England until it was seized in 1538 under Henry VIII during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The wider site was awarded Scheduled Ancient Monument status in 1915 and the abbey was brought into the care of the then Ministry of Works in 1917. The ruins of its main buildings are today a tourist attraction, owned and maintained by English Heritage. The Cleveland Way long distance footpath passes just to the south of the abbey.

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