DSC_3146 on Flickr.
Yesterday was yet another trip to Knaresborough, and no, I am nowhere near tired of that town. This one was excited because it was guided by Bob Woosnam-Savage, who is a curator at the Royal Armouries and was a consultant on the fight scenes in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films. We toured the castle - which I’d never been inside - and the sallyport, which was a hidden exit through the moat that would only have been used in an emergency. (Sidenote: medieval moats were NOT filled with water. They were medieval trashcans/plumbing, PLUS shards of broken pottery and jagged bits of metal, so that just in case you weren’t deterred by the idea of walking through human excrement, you would stay out of the moat for fear of being sliced up.) Anyways, not a lot of sallyports survive, and many of those that do are just doors in the sides of the castle walls - the one at Knaresborough is an original medieval tunnel with added Victorian stairs. The closest castle that also has a surviving sallyport is Nottingham Castle.
After the castle I got a quick lunch at the Lavender Rooms (above Ye Oldest Chymist Shoppe) with Natalie, Marina, Sarah, and Mark. We ate Yorkshire Rarebit, which is delicious thick bread with a melty cheese/mustard/ale sauce on top, and drank tea. Mmmm! Then it was off to the Shrine of Our Lady of the Crag and the cave of Robert the Hermit. I really enjoyed the Shrine, since I am quite fascinated by religious structures and, well, it’s a chapel carved out of a cave. That was my favorite bit of the trip. After the cave, Natalie and I walked back to the Lavender Rooms and got more tea and cake! I had a delicious Lemon Drizzle cake and Natalie got the Cherry Coconut cake. All in all, a fabulous day!
You can always see more pictures on Flickr (start with that one and click “Next”), and also you can click on these pictures to enlarge them and see captions.
Byland Abbey
Yesterday I went on a field trip with the Institute for Medieval Studies (of which I am kind of a member) here at the university. We visited St Mary’s Church at Lastingham, which was at one point an abbey but is now a parish church, and then Rievaulx and Byland abbeys, which are both Cistercian ruins. These pictures are from Lastingham. (Family: The names of the places we went are links if you feel inclined to click them.) Also, the University of Sheffield has some really thorough information about Cistercian abbeys in Yorkshire here. These pictures are from Byland Abbey.
If my attention wandered at Rievaulx, it was nothing to Byland. The sky was really pretty, I was still super cold, and I get distracted when I’m taking pictures. But pretty much everybody was distracted by this point: the guides talked to us for about 15 minutes and then just let us all wander around. This is the end of this trip, y’all! I don’t have any more cool factoids for you today. I have to go study for my Latin test, anyway. And eat lunch. Yum.
Rievaulx Abbey
Yesterday I went on a field trip with the Institute for Medieval Studies (of which I am kind of a member) here at the university. We visited St Mary’s Church at Lastingham, which was at one point an abbey but is now a parish church, and then Rievaulx and Byland abbeys, which are both Cistercian ruins. These pictures are from Lastingham. (Family: The names of the places we went are links if you feel inclined to click them.) Also, the University of Sheffield has some really thorough information about Cistercian abbeys in Yorkshire here. These pictures are from Rievaulx.
Learning!
Kendall, Lucy, Peeejjj AKA Posh John
With Mark, our Latin clinic tutor, and his fiancée, Sarah, also a PhD student here.
I take full responsibility for the fact that I paid almost no attention to our expert guides at Rievaulx, but I blame it on my inner monologue, which was just going SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE at a really high volume the whole time we were there. But! I can tell you a few things about Rievaulx because we studied it in my Monasticism class last semester. Rievaulx was the first Cistercian abbey in England (and was one of the earlier Cistercian abbeys overall). Cistercians always use twelve monks to found new monasteries, and Bernard of Clairvaux sent the founders of Rievaulx from his abbey in 1132. The abbey is so named because it lies on the River Rye, which is apparently prone to pretty intense flooding. A few years ago it flooded and destroyed the Visitor Centre at Rievaulx. The Cistercians figured out the river’s game and never built on that spot, but apparently English Heritage was less wise. There are live chickens at the Visitor Centre, in case you’re into chickens. Riveaulx and Byland were both abandoned in the wake of the Reformation in England (you know, because England pretty much outlawed Catholicism and all the monasteries here were run by Catholics).
St Mary’s Church, Lastingham
Yesterday I went on a field trip with the Institute for Medieval Studies (of which I am kind of a member) here at the university. We visited St Mary’s Church at Lastingham, which was at one point an abbey but is now a parish church, and then Rievaulx and Byland abbeys, which are both Cistercian ruins. These pictures are from Lastingham. (Family: The names of the places we went are links if you feel inclined to click them.) Also, the University of Sheffield has some really thorough information about Cistercian abbeys in Yorkshire here. These pictures are from Lastingham.
Professor Richard Morris from the University of Huddersfield used to work here at the University of Leeds. He is talking about the cross head on the floor in front of everyone. The part you can see in the crypt would have been the horizontal part of the cross. The whole thing would have stood 24ft (8m) high.
I don’t think the crypt is usually open to visitors, although there were several candles burning when we got down there.
Norman column.
The church from the outside.
You can’t really tell from these pictures, but it was SUPER COLD and by the time we were done hearing from all our experts I thought my toes were about to fall off (admittedly I didn’t dress warmly enough, but I was not the only one who was complaining). The vicar kindly invited us to the vicarage for coffee and biscuits, even though that meant about 30 people all tramping into his house at the same time. He was quite nice about it, though, and it warmed us all up.
