York Guides

IN 1134 the Abbey of Furness, then belonging to the Order of Savigny, sent out a colony to Calder in Coupland, twelve monks with one Gerold as their abbot. But four years later the new abbey was plundered and burnt by the Scots and the colony returned to Furness. Abbot Gerold being unwilling to renounce his rank, difficulties arose, and in the end he decided to go with his monks to Archbishop Thurstan of York, who had shown himself well-inclined towards monks. On their way they came to Thirsk, where Gundreda de Albini, mother of Roger de Mowbray, received them kindly and with her son's agree¬ment sent them to Hood, near Thirsk, where a relation of her family, one Robert de Alneto, who had been a monk in the Benedictine Abbey of Whitby, was living as a hermit. In a short time the hermit joined their order and the monks settled down at Hood. But this was only for a few years, for as their possessions and numbers in¬creased, the site became too small; and the gift of the vill of Byland in 1143 made occasion for a removal into Ryedale, where Roger de Mowbray gave them a site on the right bank of the Rye, not far from the Cistercian Abbey of Rievaulx, which had been settled on the left bank twelve years before by Walter 1'Espec. The place was in itself suitable enough, but the two houses were too near each other. Each monastery could hear the other's bells at all hours of the day and night, 'which was not fitting and could by no means be endured'. As the later arrivals, the Byland monks had to give way and once more, in 1147, they set forth on a journey, this time westward over the moor, to a new site given them by Roger de Mowbray, 'two carucates of waste land in the territory of Cukwald below the hill of Blakhou'. This is elsewhere called Stocking. Here they built a small stone church with a cloister and offices and settled down for a while. In this year the order of Savigny was absorbed into the Cistercian order and Byland became a Cistercian house.

Abbot Gerold had died in 1142, and was succeeded by Abbot Roger, who remained in office no less than fifty-four years, retiring on account of old age in 1196. In his time the final journey was taken eastward to the site where the ruins of the abbey are seen to-day. It was overgrown and marshy, but its possibilities were apparent, and so 'when the said Abbot Roger had dwelt with his monks, as is aforesaid, in the western part if the land of Cukwald, they began manfully to root out the woods, and by long and wide ditches to draw oft" the abundance of water from the marshes; and when dry land appeared they prepared for themselves an ample, fitting and worthy site in the eastern part of that land, between Whitcker and the foot of the hill of Cambc, that is, next to Burtoft and Bersclyve, where they built their fair and great Church, as it now appears. May the All Highest perfect it and preserve it for evermore. And so they removed thither from Stockyng on the eve of All Saints, in the year of our Lord's Incarnation, 1177, and there, God willing, they shall prosperously remain for ever'. So wrote Abbot Philip in 1197. Dis ciliter visum.

The subsequent history of the abbey was uneventful. It makes its one appearance in national history in 1322, when an invading Scottish force defeated and nearly captured King Edward II at Shows Moor near Byland.

At the suppression in 1538 the annual income of Byland was £295, and there were twenty-five monks beside the abbot. The site was granted in 1540 to Sir William Pickering and came successively to the families of Wotton, Stapylton and Wombwell.