Roche Abbey / Sancta Maria de Rupe

No individual entry found for Roche in the Domesday survey. The entry for this Cistercian abbey in the Victoria County History (York, vol. 3, 1974) notes: "On 7 April 1186 Pope Urban II confirmed to Osmund, the fifth abbot, and his monks some twenty gifts of land, in addition to the sites given for the building of the abbey by the two co-founders. [NB: the first abbot listed in the VCH entry took office in July 1147] [...] Not much is known of the internal affairs of the house until the period of the Dissolution. [...] By far the most important and interesting document relating to Dissolution times is a graphic account of the despoiling of the monastic buildings, written in 1591"; the latter makes interesting reading specially in regards the handling of the conventual church: "For the Church was the first thing that was put to the spoil; and then the Abbot's lodging, Dorter, and Frater, with the cloister and all the buildings thereabout within the Abbey walls; for nothing was spared but the oxhouses and swinecoates, and such other house of office, that stood without the walls; which had more favour showed them than the very Church itself: which was done by the advice of Cromwell, as Fox reporteth in his Book of Acts and Monuments. It would have pitied any heart to see what tearing up of lead there was, and plucking up of boards, and throwing down of the sparres: when the lead was torn off and cast down into the Church, and the tombs in the Church all broken (for in most abbeys were divers noble men and women, yea and in some Abbeys, Kings, whose tombs were regarded no more than the tombs of all other inferior persons: for to what end should they stand, when the Church over them was not spared for their cause), and all things of price either spoiled, caryed away, or defaced to the uttermost. The persons that cast the lead into the fodders, plucked up all the seats in the choir, wherein the monks sat when they said service, which were like to the seats in minsters, and burned them and melted the lead therewith all: although there was wood plenty within a flight shot of them; for the Abbey stood among the woods and the rocks of stone: in which rocks was pewter vessels that was conveyed away and there hid; that it seemeth that every person bent himself to filch and spoil what he could: yea, even such persons were content to spoil them, that seemed not two days before to allow their religion and do great worship and reverence at their Mattins, Masses, and other Service, and all other their doings: which is a strange thing to say, that they that could this day think it to be the House of God, and the next day the House of the Devil; or else they would not have been so ready to have spoiled it. For the better proof of my saying, I demanded of my father, thirty years after the Suppression, which had bought part of the timber of the Church, and all the timber in the steeple, with the bell-frame, with others his partners therein (in the which steeple hung viii, yea ix bells; whereof the least but, one could not be bought at this day for xxli, which bells I did see hang there myself more than a year after the Suppression), whether he thought well of the Religious persons and of the Religion then used? And he told me, Yea: for, said he, I did see no cause to the contrary. Well, said I, then how came it to pass that you was so ready to destroy and spoil the, thing that you thought well of? What should I do? said he. Might I not as well as others have some profit of the spoil of the Abbey? for I did see all would away; and therefore I did as others did." [NB: the font, being of stone, is not mentioned among the chosen spoils]. [NB: we have no information on the font of the abbey church here]