There can be no more delicious spot in the world. St Bernard loved the
valleys as St Benedict the hills, and as St Bernard was the refounder
of the Cistercian Order to which Beaulieu belonged, it, like Waverley,
Tintern, Netley, and a hundred others in England, was set in one of
those delicious vales in which I think England is richer than any other
country, and which here, in England of my heart, seem to demand rather
our worship than our praise.
Beaulieu Abbey had always interested me. In the first place it was one
of the greatest, though not the earliest, houses in England of the
Cistercian Order, that reform of the Benedictines begun as William of
Malmesbury bears witness by an Englishman, Stephen Harding, sometime a
monk of Sherborne. And then it was the only religious house within the
confines of the New Forest. It seems that in the year 1204, just a year
after he had given the manor of Faringdon in Berkshire to St Mary of
Citeaux, and established there a small house of Cistercian monks, King
John founded this great monastery of St Mary of Beaulieu for the same
Order, making provision for not less than thirty brethren, and giving
it Faringdon for a cell.
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