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                            FOUNTAINS ABBEY

                   [Illustration: _Fountains Abbey_

       _J. M. W. Turner, R.A. pinxit._          _Art Repro. Co._

       _From a drawing in the possession of J. E. Taylor, Esq._]




                            FOUNTAINS ABBEY

                        THE STORY OF A MEDIÆVAL
                      MONASTERY BY GEORGE HODGES
                      D.D. DEAN OF THE EPISCOPAL
                     THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL CAMBRIDGE
                             MASSACHUSETTS

                          LONDON: JOHN MURRAY
                          ALBEMARLE STREET W

                                 MCMIV

                           BALLANTYNE PRESS
                          LONDON & EDINBURGH


                              TO MY WIFE
                         I INSCRIBE THIS FRUIT
                          OF A GOLDEN SUMMER




PREFACE


The materials out of which this book is made were taken mainly from two
sources: a description and explanation of the Abbey ruins by Mr. W. H.
St. John Hope, and a collection and annotation of the Abbey records by
Mr. John Richard Walbran.

The ruins have been minutely examined by Mr. St. John Hope, who has left
no stone unconsidered. He has brought to his study of the Abbey a
profound knowledge of monastic architecture. The account of his
investigations is published in the fifteenth volume of the “Yorkshire
Archæological Journal,” to which is appended a historical ground-plan of
the Abbey, drawn by Mr. Harold Brakspear. The Marquess of Ripon has had
copies of this plan framed and placed in various parts of the buildings
for the information of visitors. Through the courtesy of Mr. Hope and
Mr. Brakspear I am enabled to give a reduced version of this excellent
plan.

The records have been gathered together by Mr. Walbran, and printed,
with many learned and interesting notes, in two volumes of the
publications of the Surtees Society, entitled “Memorials of Fountains
Abbey.” They begin with a contemporary narrative of the foundation of
the Abbey, and extend to the grant which the king made of the Abbey
lands after the suppression. They include the chronicle of the
administrations of the abbots; the deed of the ground on which the Abbey
stands; a series of royal charters and a series of papal privileges;
various records of the dealings of the Monastery with its neighbours,
clerical and lay; letters to Thomas Cromwell from Layton and Legh, the
commissioners at whose demand the Abbey was surrendered, and from
Marmaduke Bradley, the abbot who surrendered it; and the king’s
assignment of pensions by name to the abbot and the monks after the
dissolution.

Of these documents, the longest and most interesting is the contemporary
account of the foundation--_Narratio de fundatione Fontanis Monasterii_.
It was written by Hugh, a monk of the daughter house of Kirkstall, upon
information given him by Serlo, an aged brother then resident in that
abbey, who had once lived at Fountains. Serlo was almost a hundred years
old when he sat in the sun in the cloister of Kirkstall, and told this
story of his early days, answering Hugh’s questions. “It is now,” he
says, “the sixty-ninth year of my conversion. When I first went to
Fountains to associate myself to that holy brotherhood, I was, as I
remember, about beginning my thirtieth year.” The Abbey, at that time,
as he tells us in another place, was five years old; but he had been
acquainted with the brethren before. “When the monks left the monastery
of York, I myself was present. I had known their names and faces from my
boyhood; I was born in their country, was brought up amongst them, and
to several of them I was related by ties of blood. And although I am, as
thou may see, far advanced in years, I am very grateful to my old age
that my memory remains unimpaired, and particularly retentive of those
things committed to it in early years. Such things, therefore, relating
to the origin of the Monastery of Fountains, which I personally
witnessed, or have gathered from the credible report of my elders, I
will now relate.”

Serlo spent ten years at Fountains, leaving in 1147, with the colony
which founded Kirkstall. After that