Foundation
There is a little confusion over the actual founding of the monastery. It was founded by a group of monks from Whitland Abbey, at a time of very fast expansion of the Cistercians, the White Monks. Building actually began on a different site on the banks of the Afon Fflur (from which the present Abbey takes its name), a short distance from the present site. Currently farm land, there are stories that huge stones were unearthed on the original site, known as Hen Fynachlog (the Old Monastery), though how true this is has yet to be formally investigated. Overall, it is considered that the Abbey was founded around 1164 A.D. thanks to the patronage of the Lord Rhys, which is why many of his descendants were buried there. In 1184, a further charter was issued by Lord Rhys re-affirming Strata Florida as a monastery under the patronage of Deheubarth.
Construction work on the church began, and it was consecrated in 1201.
Read more about this topic: Strata Florida Abbey
Famous quotes containing the word foundation:
“What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic and Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A full belly to the labourer was, in my opinion, the foundation of public morals and the only source of real public peace.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)
“Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation.... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)