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out of her own dower the Vill of Byland on the Moor, afterwards known as "Old Byland."

Though this estate contained, according to Domesday Book, about seven hundred acres, the actual site available for the monastic buildings was inconveniently small. So when Roger de Mowbray saw that "many had come together to serve God" in a place which for this reason, and also on account of its proximity to Rievaulx, was altogether unsuitable, he gave his favourites in 1147 "two carucates" of waste ground under the hill of Blackhow, near Coxwold. The name of the new site was Stocking, and here the monks remained thirty years and built themselves a small stone church and cloister.1 At last, on the eve of the festival of All Saints, in the year 1177, the final move was made to the place which, in memory of their first settlement on the banks of the Rie, they called Bellalanda or Byland. The former, it may be remarked, is just one of those translations from workaday Saxon into devout dogLatin in which the monks delighted.

From the date of this final settlement to that of the surrender of the Abbey in 1540 into the hands

1

1 It is clear, however, that the monastery at Old Byland was not yet entirely deserted, for, as Walbran has pointed out, the monks who in 1150 went out to found Jervaulx Abbey proceeded from Old Byland, "habitante Abbate Rogero cum suis monachis apud Stockyng."

of the King's agents, history has little to say of the monks of Byland. Roger de Mowbray, we know, like Walter l'Espec, became an inmate of the monastery he had founded, but whether or not he was buried in the chapter-house is a point on which the chroniclers are not of one mind.

“This Roger," says one, "having been signed with the Cross, went into the Holy Land, and was captured there in a great battle by the Saracens. He was redeemed by the Knights of the Temple, and, worn out with military service, he returned to England. On his journey he found a dragon fighting with a lion in a valley called Saranel, whereupon he slew the dragon and the lion followed him to England and to his Castle of Hood. After this he lived fifteen years and died in a good old age, and was buried at Byland under a certain arch in the south wall of the chapter-house.”

"He died," says another, "in the Holy Land, and was buried in Syria."

Equally doubtful is another claim to historical interest which has been put forward on behalf of Byland. On the 14th of October 1322, the Scots. under Douglas swept down from the moors, routed the English, took the Earl of Richmond prisoner, and would have captured King Edward himself if he had not hastily fled, under the guidance, it is said, of two monks, in the direction of York.

Was the King at Rievaulx, as the chronicler of Lanercost alleges, or in the middle of his dinner at

Byland, as Knighton circumstantially relates? historian of the latter Abbey would say at once, and doubtless prove conclusively, that this interrupted meal at Byland was as clear as daylight or the virtues of Mary Queen of Scots, but the impartial critic must leave the public to judge between the conflicting authorities.

No one has yet challenged the claim of our monastery to have been, soon after its foundation, the penitentiary of that fierce old lion Wymund, the soldier-bishop of Man and the Isles.

"For some time,” as has been quaintly said, "he successfully led his flock on marauding expeditions against the isles and coast of Scotland, and baffled all the efforts of David, King of that country, to take him. He was at length, however, defeated by a brother bishop, taken prisoner, and had his eyes put out."

I am not sure on what authority this last statement rests. It has been more generally believed that Wymund, whom King David had attempted to bribe to good behaviour by a grant of the lordship of Furness, made himself so hateful to his vassals that they seized him, put out his eyes, and sent him to end his days at Byland. It is admitted that this remarkable ecclesiastic began his career as a monk at Furness, and the story of his last gloomy years at Byland is vouched for by William of Newburgh, who

both saw him and heard his reiterated boast, that by God alone had he been defeated, and "if he had but so much as a sparrow's eye he would make his enemies repent.”

Such, let it be remembered, were the men and manners with which medieval monasticism had to do.

But it is time to speak of the visible and tangible remains which have come down to us from these dim, remorseful days.

There is something very striking in the abrupt descent from the lonely plateau of moor south of Duncombe Park to the sequestered valley of Byland. "Its little hoof-crossed becks and cottage doors;

Tired grandames gazing o'er the shadowy sills,
And children basking by the streamlet's shores ;
And glass-green waters broad and full and still,
Rich with the twinklings of ten thousand leaves;
And gray forsaken ruins, bare and chill."

But undoubtedly the most picturesque view of the Abbey is obtained from the low ground to the south, whence the broken outline of the ruin is seen against the leafy background of the rising hill.

Time and decay have treated Byland and its greater offspring of Jervaulx with a strange unconscious irony. As we approach the latter we see, indeed, huge and imposing masses of ruin, high mossgrown walls, pillars, and pointed window, but we

wonder, perhaps, what gives them so confused and disorganised an air, till it strikes us that the great central object, the beginning and end, the cause at once and crown of all, is missing, and we ask, "Where is the church?" The answer to that question belongs to another time and place; but at Byland, meanwhile, our eye rests indeed upon the ruins of a noble church, but seeks in vain for the domestic buildings of a monastery.

Grassy mounds and low-lying moss-grown stones are there, but the wise and fruitful zeal which has disclosed at Jervaulx the whole ground-plan of the missing building, has not yet explored the foundations which undoubtedly exist in the precinct of the older monastery.

As it is, however, the normal Cistercian plan may with tolerable certainty be traced, and even the singular and hitherto unexplained passage between the western cloister and the cellarium1 can be identified and compared with the parallel instances at Kirkstall and Beaulieu.

The Abbey Church of St. Mary at Byland is a very noble and instructive example of the earliest

1 The cellarium "is the long range of buildings extending from the church along the west side of the cloister and considerably beyond it." Of this cellarium, miscalled the “domus conversorum," it will be necessary to say more in a subsequent chapter.

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