Rievaulx Abbey — Where Beauty and Silence Still Speak
Video from Christian Art
Rievaulx Abbey — Where Beauty and Silence Still Speak
"Fr. Patrick van der Vorst travels to Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire to explore one of Britain’s most beautiful monastic ruins and discover the extraordinary story of the Cistercian monks who made this remote valley their home. Through its soaring architecture, the writings of St Aelred and the living witness of monasticism today, he asks why, almost 500 years after the abbey was dissolved, Rievaulx still feels like a place of prayer.
Founded in 1132 by Cistercian monks sent from Clairvaux in France, Rievaulx began with a radical idea: to withdraw from the distractions of the world and return to a simpler life centred on prayer, work and poverty.
The monks chose a wild and isolated Yorkshire valley through which the River Rye flowed. From modest timber beginnings, Rievaulx grew into an enormous complex of churches, cloisters, workshops and farms, eventually becoming one of the most important Cistercian monasteries in medieval England.
Fr. Patrick explores the surviving abbey church and its soaring Gothic architecture. These buildings were never created simply to impress. The entire monastery was designed around a particular rhythm of life, with prayer at its centre.
Rievaulx also became a remarkable economic enterprise. Its estates supported thousands of sheep and its wool was traded across Europe. What began as a small group seeking solitude became a powerhouse of medieval agriculture and industry.
At the heart of Rievaulx’s story is St Aelred, who became abbot in 1147. A prolific writer on prayer and the spiritual life, Aelred wrote particularly beautifully about friendship. For him, friendship was not a distraction from the search for God, but could itself become a means of encountering divine love.
That way of life came to an abrupt end under Henry VIII. On 3 December 1538, after more than four centuries of continuous monastic life, Rievaulx was surrendered to the Crown. The monks left, the buildings were stripped of valuable materials and the great monastery gradually fell into ruin.
But was the spiritual life of Rievaulx really extinguished?
Fr. Patrick meets historian Lucy Beckett, who has lived beside the abbey for 50 years, and Fr. Henry Wansbrough, a Benedictine monk of Ampleforth Abbey, to explore why Rievaulx continues to exert such a powerful attraction.
Now 94, Fr. Henry reflects on his own long monastic vocation and the remarkable continuity between the monks of medieval Rievaulx and monastic communities today.
What made Rievaulx truly alive was never simply its architecture. It was the men who lived here and the lives they chose to lead. They stepped away from possessions, noise and worldly ambition in order to make more room for God.
Nearly five centuries after its monks departed, Rievaulx remains a place where beauty and silence still speak." from the video introduction
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