Recruits

(4/6)

Helmsley Castle
© Cistercians in Yorkshire Project
<click to enlarge>

To support the growing numbers at Rievaulx the abbey needed to attract additional patronage and to expand its land-holdings. A chronological list of Rievaulx’s benefactors from 1132 to 1188, the ‘Memorial of Benefactors’, is recorded in the chartulary of the house, and provides a valuable insight to the accumulation of lands and rights during the twelfth century. This 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, Walter Espec. They generally gave modest gifts of lands and rights in the near vicinity, which meant that in the early days Rievaulx expanded into its immediate environs.

Towards the end of William’s abbacy Walter Espec gave Rievaulx an additional grant of land in Bilsdale and Raisdale, in the North Yorkshire Moors.(6) This was mostly moorland and included the right to gather wood and pasture pigs in Walter’s forest at Helmsley.

This second grant seems to have been a consequence of Walter’s failure to convert his Augustinian foundation at Kirkham to a Cistercian abbey and to establish a new Augustinian house at Linton, for those members of the priory who did not wish to become Cistercian monks. (7)