External threats

Illuminated initial,
[From the 'Omne Bonum' of Jacobus Anglicus]
© British Library
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Granges were vulnerable to attacks from outsiders, whether thieves, marauders or angry locals. It was for fear of bandits and wild beasts that the shepherds of Rievaulx's remote grange at Esklet, in Westerdale, carried horns and set traps for wolves.(48) A number of Yorkshire granges were devastated in the early fourteenth century, following the Scots' invasion of the North of England. Fountains suffered considerably in 1319, when its home estates were pillaged by the Scots, and in 1363 the abbot was granted permission by the General Chapter to repopulate vills on account of this damage.(49)

In the mid-thirteenth century, an assault on Roche's granger at Barnby left him and several of the monks beaten and wounded. Three men were accused of the assault and whilst the motive of the attack is not now known, it is thought to have been over game.(50) Roche encountered the wrath of the locals at Todwick in 1329, when an enraged mob tore down their windmill here. This was intended as an open demonstration of their anger at the obligation to grind their corn at the abbey mill and to render the twentieth bowl as payment.(51)

Arrows and outlaws
In 1267/8 Alesia de Lacy's, steward, Robert de Ripariis, challenged the abbot of Rievaulx's right to feed his cattle on certain pasture belonging to the vill of Bradford and sent several of his men (including one named Adam) to impound the abbot's cattle in the grange of Halton (in the wapentake of Skyrack). A group of men acting on the abbot's behalf came to rescue his cattle and in the melee that ensued one of these, a William Cherry-Cheek, shot at Adam with his bow, wounding him on the left side. Adam died three weeks later. William fled and was to be outlawed; his accomplices were acquitted.
[Notes on the Religious and Secular Houses of Yorkshire I, ed. W. P. Baildon, Yorkshire Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. XVII (1895), pp. 177-8.]

Kirkstall Abbey encountered its fair share of hostility in the late twelfth century when the locals of Accrington, near the Yorkshire / Lancashire border, reacted violently to Abbot Lambert's (c. 1190-3) attempts to make a grange in Accrington park. To achieve this, the abbot had dispossessed the inhabitants of Accrington, who were so angry that, 'at the instigation of the Devil,' they burnt down the monks' grange and furniture, and murdered three of the lay-brothers who managed the grange. Roger de Lacy, the magnate who had given Kirkstall the land here, was outraged by this violence and took measures to ensure that the offenders made satisfaction to the abbot for their crime. The grange was rebuilt and peace was ostensibly restored, but the episode underlines the tumultuous side to monastic life.(52)