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gold and Tyrian purple, and laid him down to rest in the 

 burying-place beside the abbey. The copier of manu- 

 scripts closed his book there, more than five hundred years 

 ago ; he, too, is gone, and with him all those who lived 

 while he was living. The abbot, who presided in regal 

 state ; the brotherhood, in their cowls and gowns ; learned 

 men, who studied in their quiet cells, and the busy 

 comers and goers, who worked either in the abbey-fields, 

 or performed such menial labours as the condition of the 

 place required not a trace of them remains : even the 

 stately monastery is in ruins, but the yew-trees still cast 

 the shadow of their noble branches on the grassless floor 

 of red-brown hue. Their history is inseparably connected 

 with that of the ruined abbey, for they stood in their 

 present site, and afforded a shelter to its founders, long 

 before one stone was laid upon another of the stately 

 building. Those who passed in the days of the Saxon 

 king, Ethelbald, through the Wolds of Yorkshire, near 

 Skelldale, in their way to Ripon, might see a company of 

 men assembled in a wild and romantic spot, watered by 

 a rivulet, and surrounded with rocks and woods. These 

 men were monks, who, desiring to imitate the extraordi- 

 nary sanctity of the Cistercian abbey of Rieval, had with- 

 drawn from their own monastery of St Mary's at 

 York, and being sanctioned in their preference by the 

 archbishop, they retired to this desolate and uncultivated 

 spot. They had no house to shelter them, nor certainty 

 of provisions to subsist on ; but, in the depth of the lone 



