advice L'Espec settled them on the banks of the Rie. As we look down from Lord Feversham's broad gallery of turf upon the roofs of the quiet village and the roofless walls of the Abbey, it is difficult to realise the wild thicket-the locus vasta solitudinis et horroris, where William and Waltheof, both personal friends of St. Bernard—prayed and fasted and built. But Rievaulx was, indeed, the ideal site for a Cistercian house. To be near a town was forbidden, and would have been alien to the Cistercian spirit.1

"The fragrant clouds of dewy steam

By which deep drove and tangled stream
Pay for soft rains, in season given,

Their tribute to the genial heaven "

were everywhere the chosen portion of these silent workers. There, as beneath the dark yews by the Skell, or the grim rock near Maltby, they "wrought in a sad sincerity," and, in accordance with their rule, dedicated their work to "St. Mary, the Queen of Heaven and Earth." Beautiful, indeed, in its decay is the Abbey which now nestles in the heart of the valley. The church, like the wooded hills and

1. "In civitatibus in castellis aut villis, nulla nostra construenda sunt cœnobia, sed in locis a conversatione hominum semotis." - Instituta Capit. Gen. Ordinis Cisterc. A.D. 1134. Quoted by E. Sharpe, Part I. of his Cist. Architecture. Cf. also

"Oppida Franciscus-magnas Ignatius urbes,

Bernardus valles-montes Benedictus amabat."

distant purple moor, seems to have been always

there.

"O'er England's abbeys bends the sky,

As on its friends with kindred eye;
For out of thought's interior sphere
These wonders rose to upper air,
And Nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,

And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat."

And yet this is not, after all, the church of Walter l'Espec and of William and Waltheof. If we look closer we shall see that there is more ornament than is consistent with Cistercian simplicity. This noble triforium, so like the work of the unreformed Benedictines at Whitby, these stately aisles-it is admirable, but it is hardly what we expected. The explanation is not far to seek. The church has obviously been altered and enlarged within the period of the first pointed style. On this, and the farther fact that its "orientation" is almost north and south instead of east and west, a wild theory was long ago set up that "the body of the old church was made to serve as the transept of the new." It is hardly necessary to say that the arrangement of the cloister and conventual buildings would alone make such a change of plan practically impossible.

The ritual and architectural east end must always have been, as now, at the south, and the western entrance at the north end of the nave. It is perfectly true that the transept contains all the original round arched work of L'Espec which now remains above ground, but there is no reason for supposing that the nave either required or received any subsequent addition. It was by no means uncommon for the ritual choir to extend over the transept opening and several bays of the architectural nave, and this was, in all probability, the case at Rievaulx.

The normal eastern arm of Cistercian churches was originally short, "the choir being placed in and west of the crossing." " 1 Rievaulx has been altered and enlarged, but it has not been turned round. Its architectural choir, or eastern limb, probably owes its extent and beauty to the emulation excited in the minds of the monks by the ambitious and successful work of their neighbours of Byland. At one time it seemed as if the wanderings of that Ulysses of abbeys were to end on the banks of the Rie at a point nearly opposite Rievaulx; and though the disturbing influence of the bells of Byland ceased with its re

1 See an admirable paper on "The Cistercian Plan" by Mr. J. T. Micklethwaite, F.S.A., in the Journal of the Yorkshire Archæological and Topographical Association for December 1881.