Author name: Richard Clarke

Above is an 18th century engraving showing Swine church post Reformation but before the tower was rebuilt in 1787 (for the church today s.p.b.s). Clearly the church of the Cistercian nunnery had a crossing tower and transepts, the bricked-up entrance to the nave from the crossing tower shows a late-Norman arch testament to the initial […]

Given that nunneries were comparatively numerous in the East Riding, although all except Swine and Watton (see later) were small, it is worth dwelling on this issue for a while. The maintenance of a nunnery presented considerable logistical problems and Thompson (s.p.b.s) tries to address some of these. Given that the Cistercian Order defined what

Today’s picture is a photo. of Swine church taken from the south-east part of the churchyard, a photo. taken some years ago. Thompson (s.p.b.) wrote his history of Swine (s.p.b.) in an age less commited to conservation than our own, in his Preface he writes ‘The rapid decay of the antiquities of the country by

The picture above, as with the previous blog, is the frontispiece of a book published in 1824 and entitled ‘A History of the Church and Priory of Swine in Holderness’, thus a history of the parish and of the Cistercian nunnery which existed there up to the Reformation of the late 1530s. The author was

(The second source of evidence on Meaux Abbey) – surviving cartularies from the 14th and 15th centuries in the national archives (cartularies were recordings of land holdings at the time). Meaux Cistercian Abbey was founded in the 12th century (s.p.b.) by William Le Gros a second generation Norman baron and Earl of York, but only

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