Only by virtue of the Abbey site at Meaux and the connected nunnery at Swine did the Cistercian Order impact on life in medieval East Riding, although these were both very significant sites.
The East Riding does not have an equivalent of the standing ruins sites of Cistercian abbeys in North, West and South Yorkshire – Fountains, Rievaulx (see above), Byland, Kirkstall, Roche and Jervaulx, the site at Meaux being evidenced by surface undulations alone. That said, the Cistercian nunnery site at Swine does retain part of the conventual church.
The Cistercian monastic order was founded in France in the late 11th century (most reformist monastic orders originated in France and migrated to England) on the principals of study, worship, the virtue of manual agricultural labour and of agricultural enterprise in remote areas previously considered hostile to farming. As priories were donated larger areas of land Cistercians built ‘granges’ (farmsteads) from which the land around was farmed by monks deployed to the site and by lay brothers, men who accepted religious life but not adherence to all the rituals of the monks day and who were housed in the monastic complex in a separate building to the monks.
Cistercians were known as ‘white monks’ from their unbleached habits. One aspect of Cistercian organisation was that each year the abbot (leader) of each priory would travel to the site of the Order’s mother church at Citeaux in France to report on their experiences and to receive guidance for the coming year.
Meaux abbey was founded in the 1150s by a small group of monks deployed to do so from the already established Fountains Abbey. Much is known about Meaux Abbey from two surviving sources of primary evidence; The Chronica Monasterii de Melsa compiled by the retired Abbot Burton at the very end of the 14th century and translated from the latin in the 19th century (copy available in the search room of Hull History Centre), and secondly …
(to be continued)