Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire, founded in
1135 by a group of monks from York who didn’t think the rules in their
Benedictine monastery, St Mary’s, were strict enough - they started a
riot,
then were booted out. The archbishop of York found them some land in a remote corner of Yorkshire. In 1133 The monks asked
the Cistercian order (already present in Yorkshire at Rievaulx) to allow
them to join. Monks from Clairvaux were sent to instruct them in the
rules of the order.
The monastery began as simple wooden buildings, but It was steadily
rebuilt over the next 400 years; after a period of poverty in the late
13th/14th
centuries, due to problems in the wool market,
its
wealth grew. At the dissolution, it was the wealthiest Cistercian abbey
in England.
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