Dore Abbey, Herefordshire

All that remains of the Abbey of St Mary of Dore is the chancel and part of the crossing of the abbey church.

Left: the church in the early 21st century. The tower is 17th century: the nave originally extended west (to the left) from the remaining structure.

Dore Abbey was founded in 1147 by Robert of Ewyas as a house of Cistercian monks. Cistercians followed the rule of St Benedict and saw themselves as a return to the purity of the original form of the rule. Their habit was white - in their original form they wove their own cloth from sheep raised on their own pastures. The monastery was that of St Mary of Dore; all Cistercian monasteries were dedicated to Our Lady.

Dore was the only English daughter house of the abbey at Morimond in France, itself one of the four original daughter houses of Cîteaux, the first Cistercian monastery. The Latin name for Cîteaux was Cistercium - hence Cistercian. From Cîteaux the movement spread all over Europe; There were over 700 Cistercian abbeys by 1350.

In the 1140s the site of Dore Abbey was not in England. Ewyas was an ancient Welsh territory. A chunk had been lost before 1052 and Osbern Pentecost, a Norman, had built a castle at the place which would later become known as Ewyas Harold. Osbern would have been a follower of Ralph de Mantes, the Norman nephew of Edward the Confessor, who had been made Earl of Hereford. When Edward's Normans were forced to take refuge with King Macbeth by the ascendant Godwins in 1052, the castle at Ewyas was presumably abandoned.

When Osbern Pentecost had been exiled with the other Normans in 1052, it is possible that his nephew, Alfred of Marlborough, had been allowed to remain. After the Norman Conquest, It has been suggested, that as a Norman who knew the area, Alfred would have been invaluable to fitz Osbern. Certainly, the earl had granted him the castle at Ewyas, a grant confirmed by the king after William's death. By 1086 Alfred held a number of manors in Herefordshire with his caput at Ewyas.

Alfred died in soon after 1086. His lands were divided between Bernard de Neufmarché, who was to become one of the leading lords of the Marches, and Harold, son of Earl Ralph de Mantes, who received the greater share. Harold would give his name to the area. By this time, the rest of Ewyas was coming under the control of another Norman family, the de Lacys, whose caput was at Weobley. Ewyas Lacy was a larger area than Ewyas Harold but a much greater proportion of it was unproductive upland.

The Marcher lords, like the rest of the Norman aristocracy, founded numerous religious houses. In 1100 Harold granted churches and tithes to Gloucester Abbey for the endowment of a priory at Ewyas Harold, although It appears to have been about twenty years before the monastery was actually founded. Harold died not long after the foundation and was succeeded to the lordship of Ewyas by his son Robert (I). Robert was succeeded by his own son Robert (II) on his death - Robert (I) was still alive in 1150-54. It was Robert I who brought the Cistercians to Dore in 1147.

In 1147, the Cistercians at Dore were not settling in an area where religious communities were a rarity. Although the native Welsh monastic houses had disappeared from the central southern March, there were a number of new, or renewed, foundations nearby. As we have seen, there was already a Benedictine priory 1½ kilometres to the south at Ewyas Harold itself. At Hereford and Leominster, there were also new houses of Benedictine monks. In 1046 the old Mercian foundation at Leominster had been suppressed by Edward the Confessor because of Sweyn Godwinson's misconduct with the then abbess. It had been re-founded in 1123 by Henry I, as a cell of the newly created Cluniac abbey at Reading. At Hereford, a new priory had been recently created as a cell of Gloucester Abbey by merging the Norman foundation of St Peter and St Paul with the old Monastery of St Guthlac. The new monastery would by rising on a new site to the north-east of the city.

William fitz Osbern had founded a Benedictine priory at Chepstow as a cell of Cormeilles Abbey, also his foundation, following the building of the castle in 1068. In about 1093 Bernard de Neufmarché founded yet another Benedictine priory at Brecon. Another had been founded at Monmouth in 1101 and yet another at Abergavenny by Hameline de Balun, its first Norman Lord. In 1118 Hugh de Lacy had endowed a church at Llanthony in Ewyas as a house of Augustinian Canons. In the castlery of Clifford, a Cluniac house was founded as priory dependent on Lewes in 1129-30. A further Benedictine priory was founded at Kilpeck in 1134 by William son of Norman, as a cell of Gloucester.

There were also other Cistercians in the Marches - Marchia Wallia as opposed to Pura Wallia, the part of Wales still ruled by the Welsh. In 1129 Sir Richard de Granville gave 8,000 acres to establish Neath Abbey as a house of Savigniac monks, who had begun to arrive in 1130. In 1147 the Savigniac order was subsumed into the Cistercians, and Neath became a Cistercian Abbey. Before this, another Cistercian house had been founded in the March. In May 1131 Walter de Clare, lord of Chepstow, founded Tintern in the lower Wye Valley. Tintern was the second Cistercian house in Britain, and the first in the March. There was also another Marches abbey, Whitland, which had been founded by Bernard, bishop of St Davids in 1140, although it would be relocated in 1151. Whitland's daughter-house at Cwmhir, founded in 1143 by Cadwallon ap Madog, would be the first Cistercian House in Wallia Pura.

Dore Abbey from the west. This was the position of the nave, the outline of which is visible on the standing part of the church.

The ground level here is now much higher than the floor of the medieval nave

Obviously, the stone church and monastic buildings at Dore took some time to build. The first buildings on the site would have been timber-framed, with wattle and daub walls. In fact, the strict Cistercian rule would have insisted that a certain minimum number of buildings were in place before the community moved in.

These would have included a chapel, refectories and dormitories for the monks and lay brothers and a kitchen. Lay brothers, members of the community who were not monks, were an essential part of a Cistercian monstery and provided the manual labour. They were entirely seperate from the choir monks who devoted their time to study and the worship of God.

Temporary wooden buildings were for Cistercian communities were being erected all over Britain in the mid 12th century. We have records for these at Fountains, Newminster, Meaux (although a stone church seems to have been raised here almost immediately) and Pipewell, and excavation evidence from Fountains and Sawley (Coppack, 1998, 25-31). These temporary buildings would have been replaced by stone ones as soon as time and money permitted

The fully developed Cistercian monastery followed a standard design. The monastic buildings were usually placed to the south of the church, unless, the topography suggested that they would be better placed to the north. This was the case at Dore.

On the opposite side of the cloister from the church was a range of buildings which comprised, from east to west, the kitchen, the monks' frater and the caldarium. The lay brothers range ran along the western side of the cloister. This had the cellarium and the lay brothers' frater on the ground floor and the lay brothers' dorter on the first floor. Sometimes, as at Dore, this range was separated from the western part of the cloister by a 'lane', a wide passage running between the church and the warming-room/monks' frater/kitchen range. There were lanes at Byland, Buildwas, Rufford, and Beaulieu. Abbeys without lanes might have separate lay brothers cloisters, such as the one at Fountains.

On the east side of the cloisters were the monks' dorter and the chapter house. This was the pattern to which all Cistercian houses conformed. There were other buildings, infirmaries and guest houses, but these could be placed where most convenient

This substantial stone wall is the lower part of the west wall of the nave.

It butts the wall behind which was, although rebuilt, part of the original structure. This wall must therefore be a later addition, implying a rebuilding of the church.

Everywhere in the topsoil are fragments of archetectural masonry.

Excavating a trench in the northern part of the cloister.