Rievaulx Abbey is in the small village of Rievaulx (pronounced 'Ree-voh'), near Helmsley
in North Yorkshire. Founded in 1132, it was one of the great Cistercian abbeys of
Yorkshire, second only to Fountains Abbey in fame. In its early days it was famed for its
scholarship, particularly under Abbot Aelred.
The Abbey was sited in a wooded valley by the River Rye, sheltered by hills. In order to
have sufficient flat land to build on, a small part of the river actually had to be diverted to
a point several metres west of where it originally flowed. It is still possible, today, to trace
the line left by the old river in the Abbey's grounds. This is one illustration of the technical
ingenuity of the monks, who over time built up a very profitable business rearing sheep
and selling wool to buyers from all over Europe. By the Middle Ages Rievaulx Abbey had
become one of the largest and richest in the country, with 140 monks and many more
lay brothers.
The dialogue of nature and art that began 800 years ago joined land form and monastic
institution in a union expressed in the abbey's name: Rdevallis in Latin, Rievaulx in
Norman French and later English, derived from the river Rie (or Rye) and its valley (or -
vaulx). Shortly after the site's settlement this dialogue found voice in an unrivalled
description of the valley's beauty written in 1167 by Walter Daniel, the abbey's infirmarer:
". . . high hills surround the valley, encircling it like a crown. These are clothed by trees of various
sorts and maintain in pleasant retreats the privacy of the vale, providing for the monks a kind of
second paradise of wooded delight. From the loftiest rocks the waters wind and tumble down to the
valley below, as they make their hasty way through the lesser passages and narrower beds and
spread themselves in wider rills, they give out a gentle murmur of soft sound and join together in
the sweet notes of a delicious melody. And when the branches of lovely trees rustle and sing
together and the leaves flutter gently to the earth, the happy listener is filled increasingly with a
glad jubilee of harmonious sound, as so many various things conspire together in such a sweet
consent, in music whose every diverse note is equal to the rest
"
.
Walter Daniel's words differ from the traditional descriptions of monastic sites in the
Middle Ages, which rehearse the ancient topos of the
locus amoenus of Classical
sources as well as the garden and flowing streams of the biblical Song of Solomon (4:
12—15). Shaped by direct observation and unambiguously site-specific, Walter Daniel's
picture of the valley site draws on the harmonic union of man and nature. Something of-
what he described in the valley may be sensed by the visitor today who walks in the
outer areas of the precinct or views the abbey from Ashberry Hill or the Rievaulx
Terrace. Far less easily accessed is his other meaning. The 'second paradise of
wooded delight' confronts us with the monks' first earthly paradise, the
pamdisus
daustmlis, the always arduous yet serene -world centred around the cloister with its
exacting disciplines of worship, reading and manual work.
Walter Daniel wrote his Arcadian description at the height of Rievaulx s influence, to
illuminate the rule of the third abbot, Aelred (1147—67). Aelred's charismatic personality
transformed -what seems today an isolated and distant moorland site into an
international centre of religious life whose name was familiar at the papal court in Rome,
the royal courts of England, France and Scotland, and throughout the ecclesiastical
networks of much of Europe. In those years Rievaulx was referred to as a 'holy place', a
'stronghold', a 'school of love', and the men who entered it were promised 'everywhere
peace, everywhere serenity, and a marvellous freedom from the tumult of the world' .
The appeal of this life can be gauged from the commitment of the more than eight
hundred men who found their way to the North York moors to make the monastery in the
first forty years of its history the largest in medieval Britain.
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