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j&tanleg jpkg. 



By the Rev. Canon Eddeup. 



F Stanley Abbey, though of royal foundation, the buildings 

 have entirely disappeared ; but its history carries us back 

 into the far past, and for those who care to remember bygone times 

 interesting associations linger round the site. 



Stanley Abbey was one of the many Cistercian abbeys in England. 

 Who were the Cistercians ? They were an offshoot of the Bene- 

 dictines, and take their name from Cistercium, now modernized into 

 Citeaux, in Burgundy, near the borders of Champagne, where in 

 the eleventh century was founded a small monastery by some Bene- 

 dictine monks, eager to follow out the austere rules of their order in 

 more full and complete strictness than they found possible in their 

 own monastery at Molesme. " Nothing could appear more stubborn, 

 more dismal, more hopeless than this spot : it suited their rigid mood : 

 they had more than once the satisfaction of almost perishing by 

 famine." 1 The date regarded as the foundation of the Cistercians is 

 March 21st (St. Benedict's Day), 1098. The Cistercians ever after- 

 wards chose lonely and retired places for their monasteries. The first 

 abbot and nominal founder of the order was Robert de Molesme : 

 the real founder, Stephen Harding, an Englishman of a good and 

 wealthy family, who had been brought up in the monasteiy at 

 Sherborne in Dorsetshire. Stephen, or Saint Stephen (April 17th), 

 to give him his full title, is said to have been not only a very devout 

 but a learned man, and to have taken great pains to make for his 

 monks a correct copy of the Bible, for which he consulted many 

 learned Jews on the Hebrew text. But the Cistercians, notwith* 

 standing the strictness of their asceticism, would never, as far as we 

 can judge, have reached the fame and influence which they soon 

 obtained, had it not been that some fifteen years after this, in 1113, 



1 Miknan's Latin Christianity, viii,, iv., vol. iii., p. 226. 



