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Fountains Abbey: History
Fountains Abbey: Buildings
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The Fountains family (1/1) This [Newminster] was the first seed our vine
put forth;
The Fountains community had stood firm in the face of adversity and weathered the storm to establish deep and enduring roots. Now, some five years after the reformers had fled from St Mary’s, Fountains’ future was secure. The community’s reputation spread, attracting recruits and benefactors who wished to be in some way affiliated to such a praiseworthy abbey. Ralph de Merley, lord of Morpeth, was so impressed that he granted Fountains land on his estate in Northumberland to found another monastery, Newminster [Novum Monasterium]. In the January of 1139, when the necessary buildings had been erected, Fountains sent a colony of its monks under the leadership of Robert, to start a new community at Newminster. The fact that Fountains had the numbers and resources to found Newminster – and the other daughter-houses that soon followed - was testimony to the abbey’s success and commitment to the Cistercian policy of expansion, a tradition strongly upheld by Fountains’ mother-house, Clairvaux, which had fostered a large and wide-spread family. Fountains soon expanded into Lincolnshire, founding daughter-houses at Kirkstead and Louth Park. The two monks of Fountains sent to lead these new communities, Robert of Sewell and Gervase, had been members of the founding community that had fled from St Mary’s in the tumult of 1132.
The first book of the foundation history ends with the death of Abbot Richard, described as his ‘falling asleep’. Abbot Richard had seen the Fountains community through difficult times and led them to stability, security and success. He had established the abbey’s renown and was himself highly reputed. Indeed, he greatly impressed Bishop Alberic of Ostia, the papal legate whom he guided around the North of England and Scotland in 1138, and accompanied to Rome. This, however, was to be Richard’s final journey, for he contracted a fever en route and died at Rome, where he was buried in 1139: [the Lord] took him from his pilgrimage
to his home, from |
