Fountains Abbey lies in the narrow valley of the River Skell, a few miles west of Ripon. The site holds two places, the ruined abbey and the water garden of Studley Royal. The abbey belonged to monks who came here seeking a hard and simple life and, over four centuries, became one of the richest communities in England. The garden was built by a politician who fell from power in a financial scandal and spent the rest of his life creating it.

The Monks

The story begins with a quarrel in York. In 1132 a group of monks at St Mary’s Abbey (see our York post here) wanted a stricter life. The abbot refused, and Archbishop Thurstan took thirteen of them under his protection. On 26 December 1132 he led them to a site about three miles from Ripon. Their prior, Richard, became the first abbot, and the monks built huts around a great elm. The valley offered shelter from the weather, stone and timber for building, and running water. Its springs gave the place its name, Fountains.

The first winter was hard. When it ended, the monks wrote to Bernard of Clairvaux, the leading figure of the Cistercian order, and asked to join. Bernard sent them one of his monks, Geoffrey, to teach them the Cistercian way of life. The Cistercians wanted a return to the strict rule of Saint Benedict. The monks worked hard, lived mostly in silence, ate a diet barely above subsistence, and wore habits of coarse undyed wool.

The order brought one change that shaped everything after it: lay brothers. Lay brothers were usually illiterate men who took religious vows but were not monks. They worked as masons, tanners, shoemakers and smiths, but their chief job was to look after the abbey’s huge flocks of sheep. Wool made Fountains rich, and lead mining, cattle, horse breeding and stone quarrying added to its wealth. The monks had come to the valley looking for poverty. By the middle of the thirteenth century, Fountains was one of the richest abbeys in England.

Henry VIII

The end came from the king. In the 1530s Henry VIII broke with Rome and set out to close England’s monasteries and take their wealth as we have been describing in other posts. His commissioners accused Abbot William Thirsk, of immorality and incompetence, and removed him. His replacement was Marmaduke Bradley, a monk of the abbey who had reported Thirsk’s alleged offences, testified against him and offered the authorities six hundred marks for the post. On 26 November 1539, Bradley surrendered the abbey to the Crown. The monks, about thirty of them, were sent away with pensions. After more than four hundred years, the life of the abbey stopped in a single day. All was over.

The Ruin

For a short time there was hope that the abbey church might become the cathedral of a new bishopric in the Dales. It did not happen. By 1540 the glass and lead from Fountains had already gone to Ripon and York. That year the Crown sold the buildings and 500 acres of land to a merchant, Sir Richard Gresham. He began stripping the abbey of anything valuable, and for years afterward the ruins served as a stone quarry. In 1597 Sir Stephen Proctor acquired the estate and built Fountains Hall with stone taken partly from the monastery. The house still stands near the ruins.

John Aislabie

Next to the Fountains estate lay another property, Studley Royal. The Mallory family owned it from 1452. The Aislabies came from Hemingbrough in Yorkshire, where the family had been yeoman farmers, small landowners who farmed their own land. John’s father, George Aislabie, was registrar to the Archbishop of York. He married Mary Mallory, daughter of Sir John Mallory of Studley Royal, and the estate came to the Aislabies through her in 1667.

John Aislabie was the fourth son, so he was not born to inherit. His eldest brother died as a student at Oxford, and the next brother died in 1693. John, then twenty three, had just finished studying law at Cambridge, and he inherited everything. One account calls him a young man in a hurry to build a career. He became Member of Parliament for Ripon in 1695, a Lord of the Admiralty in 1710 and Treasurer of the Navy in 1714. In 1718 he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, the minister in charge of the nation’s money.

His fall came with the South Sea Company. As Chancellor, Aislabie negotiated the deal between the government and the company, and he led the effort to get the House of Commons to accept it. Under the scheme, the company took over part of the national debt. Its shares rose wildly in 1720 and then collapsed, a crash remembered as the South Sea Bubble. An investigation found that Aislabie had received £20,000 of company stock for promoting the scheme. He resigned in 1721, was expelled from Parliament and was held for a time in the Tower of London, charged with dangerous and infamous corruption.

The Garden

Aislabie had started developing the gardens at Studley Royal around 1716. After his disgrace he retired to Yorkshire and gave the garden all his energy. Work paused until about 1723, then continued faster than before. His fortune had survived the scandal.

He built a water garden along the valley in the formal Dutch style of the time, with straight canals and round ponds. Paths and drives at different levels along the steep sides of the valley open onto sudden views of carefully placed temples and follies. Some people did not forgive him. In 1735, when he joined a political attack on the government over the South Sea affair, pro-government newspapers accused him of insulting a plundered nation by building palaces and extending his parks.

William Aislabie

John died in 1742, and his only son William took over his work. William changed the fashion of the place. He added wilder, more dramatic landscapes beyond his father’s formal canals. His greatest step came on 22 December 1767, when he bought the Fountains estate from John Messenger for £18,000. The ruins of the abbey became the final view at the end of the water garden, and the monks’ church became part of the gentleman’s garden. William died in 1781, and later owners changed very little of the landscape the two men had created.

After the Aislabies

The estate stayed in private hands for almost two centuries more. Later owners, among them the Earl de Grey and the first Marquess of Ripon, excavated the abbey ruins. In 1966 West Riding County Council bought the property, and in 1983 the National Trust acquired it. In 1986 Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.