Foundation Documents from St Mary’s Abbey, York: 1085-1137

In the wake of the Conqueror’s ravaging of the North in the course of the rebellion and Danish invasion of 1069-70 the devastated city of York had to be largely rebuilt. The Conqueror himself contributed a major new abbey built in the west of the city, no doubt in a spirit of penitence for the wasting of the city and county carried out by his troops. The community’s origins were not straightforward. It had begun in the early 1080s as a struggling monastic settlement on the ancient site of Lastingham on the North York Moors under its charismatic leader, Stephen. Around 1085 the community was adopted by the king and translated to the western quarter of York, to a site which had previously been the burh of the earl of Northumbria. The Conqueror made a creative use of the new Norman elite of Yorkshire to endow and secure the new abbey, an enterprise adopted and extended by his son William II Rufus in 1088. By the end of Abbot Stephen’s term of office his abbey had absorbed a remarkable number of land grants from a variety of greater and lesser aristocrats across the North and East Ridings, as well as spawned two daughter houses in Cumbria. This new study uncovers in meticulous detail the manoeuvres of the king, the abbot and the aristocracy of Yorkshire as each looked to make spiritual and political capital out of the grand new royal foundation.