3 - ‘Lonely wooded places’: the Cistercians, their sites and their buildings

Summary

You will find much more labouring amongst the woods than you ever will amongst books. Woods and stones will teach you what you can never hear from any master. Do you imagine you cannot suck honey from the rocks and oil from the hardest stone; that the mountains do not drop sweetness and the hills flow with milk and honey; that the valleys are not filled with corn?

The Cistercians had a strong affinity with their surroundings. The physical environment was ‘a window onto the Divine’ and the taming of the landscape was symbolic of the soul’s return to God. The name of the monastery often evoked its setting. Cîteaux likely stems from the Latin cisterna which can mean a marsh or bog, while Clairvaux translates as ‘Valley of Light’ and Roche alludes to its rocky environs. There is evidence for monks identifying their abbey with its surroundings. An example is Ralph of Fountains who was sent from Yorkshire to Norway in 1146 to preside as founding abbot of Lyse, south of Bergen. Each time Ralph saw the sun setting on the fjords, he would be reminded of the Skelldale valley at Fountains and feel nostalgia for his home community. Ralph, like others who were sent to distant houses, returned to die at his own abbey and to be buried in familiar surroundings.

The White Monks favoured rural sites and were particularly associated with valleys. Early Cistercian legislation stipulated that houses should be built ‘in places removed from human habitation’ and not in cities, walled towns or villages; as previously noted no abbey was to be closer than ten Burgundian leagues (c. forty kilometres) from another monastery. But the Cistercians were contemplatives rather than solitaries and their sites were more secluded than remote. Accordingly, the monks were sheltered but not cut off from the world and most houses were relatively near to transport links and communication routes. The Hungarian abbey of Pilis, for instance, looked out onto a secluded landscape yet was within twenty kilometres of three urban centres. Melrose Abbey stood on the Roman road linking England to Tweeddale and the Lothians, whilst Tautra, in the Trondheim Fjord, was on the north-east side of a small island but close to a shipping lane.