(text continued from previous blog) Yedingham (the village being in the East Riding but the site of the priory being across the River Derwent and just into North Yorkshire). These five nunnery sites followed the Benedictine Order whereas the sixth nunnery site in East Yorkshire at Swine in Holderness followed the Cistercian Order. The site of Swine nunnery is arguably the most clearly defined into the 21st century as the parish church was largely the church of the nunnery before the Reformation. Swine today is a small village just a couple of fields east of the satellite town of Bransholme.
As regards monasteries the Augustinian canons had bases at; Bridlington (the parish church is the truncated church that served the Abbey), Kirkham (again beside the flood-bank of the River Derwent), Warter (site immediately north of the Wolds village which straddles the Pocklington to Driffield road), North Ferriby (site uncertain) and Haltemprice (site in open country between Hull and Cottingham, north of Springhead golf course). The Cistercian Order focussed on the one site at Meaux, the abbey having been founded in the late 12th century (site just above the River Hull valley immediately east of the minor road that leads from Bransholme to Routh). The Gilbertine Order developed not only their large-scale abbey at Watton (just east of the main road between Beverley and Driffield) but also a much more modest abbey at Ellerton (again beside the lower River Derwent). The Carthusians were late comers to the region establishing a base just north of the 14th century walled town of Hull, a town where friaries of two orders had already existed for over a century – Austin friars and Carmelite friars. In Beverley two friaries also existed, these of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders.