I first visted Rievaulx in the mid 1990s and have yet to recover. The scale of the Abbey is breath-taking as is its location in the Ryedale Valley of the North York Moors National Park. Even with the vast new Visitor center built by English Heritage, the site still exudes peace and serenity, exactly what the monks were seeking to escape from the world and at the same time displays the very casue of the rot inherent in western monasticism by the 13th century: the isolation, the undoubted holiness of the early monks and their determination to be self sufficient lead to vast endowments in return for prayers for dead which in turn lead to vast wealth and corruption, building both to house the vast numbers of monks and estate managers and workers but also to greater glory of the Abbots.
The Abbey was founded in 1132 by twelve
monks from
Clairvaux Abbey as a mission for the colonisation of the north of England and Scotland. It was the first Cistercian abbey in the north. With time it became one of the great Cistercian abbeys of
Yorkshire, second only to
Fountains Abbey in fame and wealth. At its peak, towards the end of the 12th Century it was home to 140 monks and 500+ lay brothers. Bt the time it was suppressed in 1538 there were only 22 monks and 102 paid servants.
Towards the end of the 13th century the abbey had incurred debts on its building projects and lost revenue due to an epidemic of
sheep scab (psoroptic
mange). The ill fortune was compounded by raiders from Scotland in the early 14th century. To make matters worse, the decimation of the population caused by the
Black Death in the mid 14th century made it difficult to recruit new lay brothers for manual labour. As a result the abbey was forced to lease much of its land. By 1381 there were only fourteen
choir monks, three lay brothers and the
abbot left at Rievaulx, and some buildings were reduced in size.
The major Cistercian houses of Yorkshire transformed the landscape with their systematic farming methods. Yorkshire still owes the Cistercians a huge debt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rievaulx_Abbey http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/rievaulx-abbey/
