Likewise he judged the master-cook
      In boiling lead to stand;
    And made the simple scullion-boye
      The heire of all his land.

[Illustration:  WHALLEY ABBEY.

Drawn by G. Pickering.  Engraved by Edw^d Finden.]

THE ABBOT OF WHALLEY

    “Earl Percy there his ancyent spred,
      The half moone shining all soe faire;
    The Norton’s ancyent had the crosse,
      And the five wounds our Lord did beare.”

—­The Rising in the North.

The Cistercian Abbey of Whalley was founded by Henry Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, who, having given the advowson of the parish to the abbey of Stanlaw in Cheshire, the monks procured an appropriation, and removed hither in 1296, increasing their number to sixty.  The parish church is nearly coeval with the introduction of Christianity into the north of England.  This foundation now became the nucleus of a flourishing establishment, “continuing,” as Dr Whitaker informs us, “for two centuries and a half, to exercise unbounded charity and hospitality; to adorn the site thus chosen with a succession of magnificent buildings; to protect the tenants of its ample domains in the enjoyment of independence and plenty; to educate and provide for their children; to employ, clothe, feed, and pay many labourers, herdsmen, and shepherds; to exercise the arts and cultivate the learning of the times; yet unfortunately at the expense of the secular incumbents, whose endowments they had swallowed up, and whose functions they had degraded into those of pensionary vicars or mendicant chaplains.”

The ruins of Whalley Abbey are situated in a beautifully-sequestered spot on the banks of the Calder, presenting some of the most extensive and picturesque remains of antiquity in the county; and the site sufficiently exemplifies that peculiar instinct, if it may be so called, which guided the monks in their choice of situations.  “Though the Cistercians affected to plant themselves in the solitude of woods, which were to be gradually essarted by the labour of their own hands, and though they obtained an exemption from the payment of tithes on that specific plea, yet they were excellent judges of the quality of land, however concealed, and never set about their laborious task without the assurance of an ample recompense.”

The following minute account of these ruins is from the pen of the historian of Whalley:—­“A copious stream to the south, a moderate expanse of rich meadow and pasture around, and an amphitheatre of sheltering hills, clad in the verdant covering of their native woods, beyond; these were features in the face of Nature which the earlier Cistercians courted with instinctive fondness.  Where these combined, it does not appear that they ever abandoned a situation which they had once chosen; and where these were wanting, it is certain they never long or willingly remained.”