york00orns

128 YORK.
Long, long in the darkness did she sit,
And her first words—
' Let there be
In Bolton, on the field of Wharfe,
A stately Priory.'
The stately Priory was reared ;
And Wharfe, as he moved along.
To matins joined a mournful voice.
Nor failed at even-song."
The pathetic tradition thus enshrined in AVordsworth's
verse will
not, however, bear the light of historical
criticism, but it will be long ere it ceases to be
associated in popular credence with the ancient walls
which still stand in all their solemn beauty in the valley
of Wharfe. Thurstan bestowed upon Bolton the
churches of Skipton and Kildwick. Nostal was
another Augustinian house. In 1130 the first nunnery
established in the north after the Conquest was
founded by Thurstan at Clementhorpe, near York.
Its inmates were Benedictines. In the following
year Walter I'Espec founded another monastic house
in the valley of the Rye, surrounded by wild moorland
hills and large tracts of deep forest.
It was a father's
memorial to a much-loved and only son who came to
an untimely end. It became the home of a colony
froin Clairvaux, sent by .St. Bernard, and its situation
fulfilled their every requirement, for it was solitary,
inaccessible, and uncultured.
A yet greater Cistercian house owes its beginning
to Thurstan, that which at the Dissolution was perhaps
second to none in the wide extent of its territorial
possessions, the magnificence of its church, and
the vastness of its monastic buildings. The princely