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The endowment
(2/15)
Walter
Espec’s initial grant to support his new foundation consisted of nine carucates of land by the River
Rye. Four of these were in Griff, some two miles SE of the abbey,
the other five in Tilleston, which is today represented by Stilton
Farm. His gift included rights of pasture, freedom from secular
services (such as the payment of tithes and tolls, the performance
of duties) and also the right to collect dead wood and timber which
could then be used for building and repair work. Whilst Walter’s
endowment may not have been overly generous, especially when compared
with Walter’s grant to his Augustinian foundation, Kirkham
Priory, it was in keeping with the Cistercian ideal and enabled
the new community to pursue a life of simplicity and poverty in
this ‘solitary waste.’ [William of Newburgh, twelfth-century
canon of Newburgh Priory]
Walter’s foundation grant was soon supplemented by other
gifts, most of which are recorded in the ‘Memorial of Benefactors’.
This chronological list of the abbey’s benefactors from 1132
to 1188 is included in the cartulary of the house and provides
a valuable insight to the community’s accumulation of lands
and rights during the twelfth century. It reveals that most of
Rievaulx’s benefactors at this time were men and women of
middling standing from the locality, who were tenants of the abbey’s
founder. They generally gave modest gifts of lands and rights in
the near vicinity, which meant that Rievaulx’s holdings were
initially concentrated around its immediate surroundings. In 1145
Walter Espec made a second grant to the monks, with the gift of
land at Bilsdale and Raisdale, in the North Yorkshire Moors. The
community received land here in Stainton from the Mowbrays, a leading
baronial family in the North.
This first stage was therefore a period of slow and steady expansion,
with the community acquiring mostly modest gifts of land in the
locality. The mid-twelfth century marked a change in Rievaulx’s
economic fortunes: the number of benefactors increased considerably
to include several prominent individuals; the geographical spread
of the abbey’s lands widened.
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