EVERYWHERE PEACE, every-where serenity, and a marvelous freedom from the tumult of the world,” wrote the twelfth-century saint Aelred, describing Rievaulx Abbey in the English county of North Yorkshire. Aelred had been born in 1110 in Hexham, Northumbria, and educated by Benedictine monks at the cathedral school at Durham, one of England’s leading centers of learning. He served for a decade at the court of David I of Scotland (r. 1124–1153), where he trained in the diplomatic arts and attained the position of master of the household. At the age of 24, Aelred left the royal court to enter Rievaulx, which had been founded a few years before by 10 monks sent from France by Bernard of Clairvaux, a leading reformer in the Cistercian movement—a form of monasticism that branched off from the Benedictines. The abbey was named Rievaulx for the River Rye on which it is located and the French word for valley, vaulx, to honor Bernard’s own abbey at Clairvaux. The Cistercians, who are also known as White Monks for the undyed white wool habits they wear, advocated a return to a simpler life, turning away from the Benedictines, whom they perceived as having strayed from the strictures of monasticism.
The abbey’s original 1,000 acres of land, which a contemporaneous source less charmed than Aelred describes as a “horrid and vast solitude,” was given to the monks in 1132 by Walter Espec, a nobleman who, as justice of the forests and later high sheriff of Yorkshire, oversaw the king’s affairs in the north. Espec also founded several other abbeys. Rievaulx was planned as the main Cistercian outpost in northern England and was intended to serve as a base for the monks to expand their reach in this part of the country and Scotland, evangelizing their commitment to a self-suffcient life filled with contemplation, solitude, and manual labor. By the time Rievaulx’s first abbot, William, died, in 1145, just 13 years after the abbey was founded, more than 300 men lived on the grounds.
Rievaulx slowly expanded
