St Mary's Abbey, York

Once one of the most prosperous abbeys in Northern England, its remains lie in what are now the York Museum Gardens, on a steeply-sloping site to the west of York Minster. The original church on the site was founded in 1055 and dedicated to Saint Olaf. After the Norman Conquest the church came into the possession of the Anglo-Breton magnate Alan Rufus who granted the lands to Abbot Stephen and a group of monks from Whitby. The abbey church was refounded in 1088 when King William II of England visited York in January or February of that year and gave the monks additional lands. The following year he laid the foundation stone of the new Norman church and the site was rededicated to the Virgin Mary. In 1137 the abbey was badly damaged by a great fire. The original boundary included a ditch and a narrow strip of ground, but the walled circuit was constructed above this in the 1260s in the Abbacy of Simon de Warwick; Abbey Church The abbey church is aligned northeast–southwest, due to restrictions of the site. The Dissolution St Mary's, the largest and richest Benedictine establishment in the north of England and one of the largest landholders in Yorkshire, was worth over £2,000 a year, (), when it was valued in 1539, during the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII; it was closed and subsequently substantially destroyed. On 26 November 1539 the Abbey surrendered £2,085 and 50 monks to the Crown. Brother Grayson's Bible A Vulgate Bible, sold at auction in England in 2010, has been identified as the possession of Brother John Grayson from St Mary's Abbey. It is an octavo volume and was printed on 8 November 1526 by Thielmann Kerver in Paris. Brother Grayson was first noted at the Abbey in 1528 but was absent from its pension list at the time of the Dissolution in 1539. It was composed in Anglo-Norman by an anonymous monk of St Mary's Abbey towards the end of the 14th century. It includes the most detailed surviving description of a medieval parliament and a well-informed account of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381; these are likely to have been written by eyewitnesses and later incorporated into the chronicle. ==Excavations in the Abbey precinct==

The Yorkshire Museum, built for the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, stands in part of the abbey cloister; parts of the east, south and west cloister walls were temporarily excavated in 1827–29 preparatory to digging the museum's foundations. who, along with E. Ridsdale Tate designed and developed the Museum of Medieval Architecture on the site. Further excavations in the abbey were undertaken in 1952–56 by the then Keeper of the Yorkshire Museum, George Willmot who encountered the pre-Norman and Roman layers beneath the west wing of the nave. Excavations in 2014 and 2015 discovered an apse in the south transept, large parts of the wall foundations, and numerous residual small finds dating from the Roman to Modern periods. These investigations also encountered fragments of human remains, disturbed from burials somewhere on the site. One of the major conclusions of these excavations was the prevalence of in situ archaeological remains at a very shallow depth beneath the modern ground surface; in some cases as little as 7 cm underground. Figure of Jesus Christ A 13th-century gilt, Limoges enamel figurine depicting Christ (the St Mary's Abbey Figurine) was discovered in the Abbey in 1826, having avoided the dissolution of the monastery in 1539. It disappeared soon afterwards, and was thought by some to have been destroyed, only to be discovered in a private art collection in Germany in the 1920s. In 2019, the statue was bought by York Museums Trust and put on display in Yorkshire Museum. ==Abbots of St. Mary's==

The abbots of St. Mary's were entitled to wear a mitre and were habitually summoned to Parliament. In total there are known to have been some 30 Abbots, including: ==Burials==

• Stephen, Count of Tréguier • Abbot Thomas Spofforth. • William de Vescy of Kildare ==Remains==

in 1778 All that remains today are the north and west walls, plus a few other remnants: the half-timbered Pilgrims' Hospitium, the West Gate and the 14th-century timber-framed Abbot's House (now called the King's Manor). The walls include interval towers along the north and west stretches, St Mary's Tower at the northwest corner, and a polygonal water tower by the river. Much stone was removed from the site in the 18th century, in 1705 for St. Olave's Church, between 1717 and 1720 for Beverley Minster, and in 1736 for the landing stage of Lendal Ferry. ==See also==