The Curmudgeons go to Rievaulx and St Aelred's Cell (York Part 3)

St Aelred, Destruction and Survival

Welcome to new paid subscribers, it’s good to have you here! This is the third post picking some of the highlights from my recent trip to the churches of York and its environs. Do check my Maps page for its location.

By the time we reached Rievaulx (North Yorkshire), just before opening time at 10am, we were hungry and thirsty as my Travelling Companion (TC) had rejected my suggestion of a breakfast spot on our way out of York as he didn’t like the look of the queue outside. He was firmly of the opinion that we would find something else along the road. In this he was absolutely wrong. As we were early, we took a walk through the village, which is rather picturesque, with some thatched cottages and a lot of fruit trees in bloom. I took this shot of Rievaulx Abbey from the place where the guesthouse and other related buildings once stood.

This is the Abbey church from the west end. I should say “west” because this is one of those rare churches which is not arranged true east-west, due to the land. It’s actually aligned south-east/north-west.

Having wandered through the village, we went to the abbey entrance and headed straight for the cafe, ordering coffee and bacon baps. These latter took a very long time to arrive, it seemed, especially for TC, who by now was getting a bit grumpy. Still, we got them after about 15 minutes and set off into the grounds fortified.

Rievaulx was a Cistercian Abbey; for those not familiar with them, they were an offshoot of the Benedictine order, who tried to go back to basics, as it were, thinking the Benedictines had got too soft. The reformed order came into existence at Citeaux in eastern France in 1098, hence the name. They grew incredibly fast and by 1200 there were 525 monasteries. Their great invention was the “lay brother”, who were drawn from the less educated section of the population - many of them were illiterate. They had vast armies of these monks, who did all the manual work and farming which went with the Cistercian life. The Choir Monks, as they were now called, were drawn from the upper classes and spent most of their day in the church or copying books, etc. The Cistercians were economic powerhouses as a result of their manpower arrangements, and the Benedictines copied them in time.