The Englishman St Stephen Harding, then Abbot of Cîteaux, sent the first monks from there to found Morimond in 1115, and he travelled to Morimond himself upon the death of the first Abbot, Arnaud, in 1126, to install the Prior of Clairvaux, Gauthier, as his successor. Abbot Arnaud had wandered off, announcing his intention to go to Jerusalem, but died in Flanders, and St Stephen clearly wished to re-establish firmer order at Morimond in consequence.
The house subsequently flourished under (Blessed) Abbot Gauthier, and his successor Blessed Otto. In 1147, under Abbot Rainald, Morimond was able to make its first foundation in England, Dore Abbey in Herefordshire. As things have turned out, this English foundation's abbey church has fortuitously survived, whereas at Morimond itself there is little left but ruins. After suffering during the 17th c wars of religion, then the Revolution, and then being despoiled and used a quarry for local buildings, only the 18th c library wing of Morimond Abbey gives much idea of how anything might have looked while it was still a functioning religious house. Here is what is left of the church:
And the remains of the library:
The organ which was at Morimond Abbey ended up being moved to Langres Cathedral after the Revolution:
Here is a plan of Morimond Abbey:
In its prime, Morimond was phenomenally successful at establishing daughter houses, having 84 of them by the time of the death of St Bernard in 1153, more than any other Cistercian house except Clairvaux. By 1145, ten monks of Morimond had already become bishops; the abbey was accepted as one of the first daughters of Cîteaux, which meant that its abbots were entitled to wear pontificalia from the early 15th century, and by the papal bull Exposcit of Pope Innocent VIII in 1489, the abbots of Cîteaux and its eldest daughters were all given the right to ordain members of their communities to both the subdiaconate and the diaconate, rather than needing to call in a bishop to do so.
Morimond was particularly associated with education. The Cistercian Pope Benedict XII founded a college at Metz in 1335 for the German daughter houses of Morimond; the Abbot of Morimond was granted the first seat in the College of St Bernard at Paris after the Abbot of Cîteaux; and the statues of the Cistercian College of St Bernard at Oxford in 1446 carried the seal of the Abbot of Morimond.
The prestige of the abbey was so high that King Boleslaw V of Poland created the Abbot of Morimond a noble of the first class in 1270; later King Henry IV of Castile created the Abbot of Morimond and his successors grandees of Spain of the first class, which gave them the right to sit with head covered in the royal presence and be received with the dignity of princes of the blood. Despite all these signs of respect from various monarchs, when Edward the Black Prince passed by Morimond after the battle of Poitiers, he nevertheless pillaged the monastery!
The church at Dore Abbey when constructed was apparently modelled on that of Morimond, and it has survived in a decent state as the parish church since the Reformation, largely as added to and Early Englishified in the course of the 13th century. So looking at it, we can gain some sense of Cistercian architecture as it was brought into England and then developed in the following decades from its first sources in mediaeval Burgundy:
The transepts and crossing (the monastic choir) date from the original 11th century construction, and the blocked up door here in the north transept was on the flight of steps that allowed the monks to come down from the monastic dorter into the church for the night office:
Here are the 13th century additions creating the high altar area, ambulatory and east end chapels, where the priest monks would have said their individual private masses at altars in a row along the east wall:
Dore Abbey had its own daughter house at Vale Royal Abbey in Cheshire. At the dissolution, it was turned into a Tudor country house, but apparently retaining several parts of the mediaeval buildings, which remain today, in what is now a golf club. Part of it came up for sale as a separate house recently, and it clearly has some mediaeval or Tudor work still visible inside:
.png)
