St Mary's Abbey, York

St. Mary's Abbey

Ruins of St Mary's Abbey Church
Monastery information
Order	Benedictine
Established	1088
Disestablished	1539
Dedicated to	St. Mary
Diocese	York
People
Founder(s)	Stephen of Whitby, Alan Rufus, William II of England, William the Conqueror
Site
Location	York, Yorkshire, England
Coordinates	53°57′41″N 1°05′17″W / 53.96139°N 1.08806°W / 53.96139; -1.08806Coordinates: 53°57′41″N 1°05′17″W / 53.96139°N 1.08806°W / 53.96139; -1.08806
Visible remains	Hospitium, precinct walls, gatehouse, abbey church (ruins with part of the nave and crossing still standing), abbot's house (substantially altered); statues and other remains in the Yorkshire Museum.
Public access	yes (Museum Gardens)

The Abbey of St Mary is a ruined Benedictine abbey in York, England and a Grade I listed building.

Once the richest abbey in the north of England, it lies in what are now the Yorkshire 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 II of Norway. 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 the King, William Rufus, 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. The foundation ceremony was attended by bishop Odo of Bayeux and Archbishop Thomas of Bayeux. The monks moved to York from a site at Lastingham in Ryedale in the 1080s and are recorded there in Domesday. Following a dispute and riot in 1132, a party of reform-minded monks left to establish the Cistercian monastery of Fountains Abbey. In 1137 the abbey was badly damaged by a great fire. The surviving ruins date from a rebuilding programme begun in 1271 and finished by 1294.

The abbey occupied an extensive precinct site immediately outside the city walls, between Bootham and the River Ouse. 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; the walls were nearly three-quarters of a mile long. In 1318 the abbot received royal permission to raise the height of the wall and crenelate it; a stretch of this wall still runs along Bootham and Marygate to the River Ouse.