02/01/2025
The Monks of Yorkshire. Norman & Medieval Yorkshire. Yorkshire Through The Years, Ian Dewhurst.
To the Cistercians, too, is Yorkshire indebted on more practical grounds. One feature of early monasticism was its economic activity, as monks who were also land-holders exploited the agricultural and mineral potential of their estates. The Cistercians were especially industrious, surrounding their abbeys with farms and managing their outlying lands from granges. Fountains Abbey, for example, developed granges specialising in iron-working, lead-smelting, horse-breeding and sheep-farming. Often the wasted estates they were granted seemed fit only for sheep: their Latin chronicles nicely convey the Rievaulx landscape on their arrival in 1131-
‘in loco horroris et vastae solitudinis.’
A short-lived foundation at Barnoldswick struggled awhile with 'the inclemency of the air and the ceaseless trouble of rain' before moving to Kirkstall; whilst Fountains on its foundation was described as a place uninhabited for all the centuries back, thick set with thorns, lying between the slopes of mountains and among rocks jutting out on both sides: fit rather to be the lair of wild beasts than the home of human beings'. Notwithstanding which, within three decades the house was swarming 'like a hive of bees' with 140 monks and 600 lay brothers. 'Our food is scanty, our garments rough, our drink is from the stream,' one of them wrote,
"under our tired limbs there is but a hard mat; when sleep is sweetest we must rise at a bell's bidding.'
The Cistercian order had originated in wool-producing Burgundy; so it was natural that they should turn their main energies to their extensive Pennine and Cleveland sheep-walks.
Kilnsey in Wharfedale became each year the bawling, teeming centre for their shearing. Steadily the Cistercians grew rich on wool; their houses were beautified by means of wool; the Fountains Abbey cellarium was built as a wool warehouse (at its peak Fountains boasted 18,000 sheep). Latin was used as a business tongue in common with the continent. In conjunction with an immigration of Flemish weavers during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they founded Yorkshire's wool trade. A surviving merchant's list of 1280 to 1315 contracts for 3,2g1 sacks of wool from the whole of England: 1,446 of which came from the Cistercians.
Under the influence of wool, York prospered on its navigable Ouse, as dealers or 'wolmongers' set up an export centre for the North. Less than a century after Hastings, the Weavers' Guild of York had a charter whereby 'no one except them shall make any cloths dyed or striped in the whole of Yorkshire, except the men of York unless it be others of the same occupation in Beverley, Thirsk, Malton, Kirkby, Scarborough and other royal boroughs' For this privilege the York guild paid the Exchequer £10 a year, coming second only to London, whose weavers paid £12; those of Lincoln, Wi******er and Oxford combined paid only £6. By the thirteenth century Beverley and Hull had also emerged as wool.
None of this occurred against a peaceful background, for Scots invaders were replacing coastal raiders as the chief threat to the stability of northern England, and Yorkshire's vulnerability explains why its nobles were allowed to grow powerful. The Honour of Richmond, comprising no less than 242 manors from the Ure to the Tees, formed an unusually large block of land awarded to one family-the Dukes of Brittany-and the great names to achieve prominence, the Percies and the Nevilles, the Cliffords and the Mowbrays, would owe their rise in part to this need for defence against the Scots.
For centuries, harvesters would work with their weapons close at hand in case of sudden attack; parish priests would lead their contingents to the muster; monks would occasionally abandon their houses to take refuge under castle walls. Yet, for all Yorkshire's castles, the fortunes of Scot and Sassenach swayed back and forth.
Near Northallerton in 1138, old Archbishop Thurstan of York took out an army against King David of Scotland, blessing his troops on the battlefield before a Host mounted on a ship's mast on a waggon, above the banners of St Peter of York, St Cuthbert of Durham, St Wilfrid of Ripon, and St John of Beverley: the resulting English victory was named the Battle of the Standard. On the other hand, an English defeat at Bannockburn in 1314 opened the gates afresh for Scottish raids; whilst the White Field of Myton on the Swale, in 1319, claimed 300 slain from among the fighting English clergy of the age.
Nor did violence spring only from external forces. William the Conqueror, recognising the commercial genius of the Jews, had encouraged their settlement in England, and a thriving, though unpopular, community had established itself at York. The intrusion of a number of Jews into Richard I's coronation at Westminster sparked off a pogrom which spread to the provinces, and in 1190 the Jews of York, harrassed by the city's more unruly residents, took refuge with their families and possessions in what old chroniclers call the Castle, but what was more likely the keep of Clifford's Tower, from which they barred the governor who had admitted them for their safety. There they were besieged by an infuriated mob exhorted by a friar, whose braining by a large stone dropped from the battlements sealed the Jews' death-warrants. Many of the men killed their wives and children, set fire to their stronghold and committed su***de; the rest were massacred and their goods looted when they perforce admitted their attackers into the burning Tower. The dead were estimated at a doubtless highly exaggerated 2,000, and records of the Jews' financial transactions were fired in the Minster nave.
Guided Walking History Tours in the Medieval Forests of England.
