Fountains Abbey



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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