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Show English .Abbey Built 800 Years Ago Now Up for Sale Rufford Abbey, 800-year-old English Eng-lish estate, is being put up for sale, London papers report. The estate contains 18,700 acres and includes the abbey, founded in the reign of King Stephen, partly rebuilt in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries and an ancient deer park of more than 500 acres. It also includes the whole or greater great-er part of the villages and parishes of Old Ollerton, Eakring, Wellow, Bilsthorpe and Ompton, as well as parts of Walesby, Egmanton, Ed-winstowe, Ed-winstowe, Farnsfield, Kirton, Blid-worth Blid-worth and Tuxford. The estate comprises about 70 farms, 38 small holdings, four licensed li-censed houses, including the famous Hop Pole at Ollerton, many private residences and shops, nearly 2,000 acres of woods and plantations, and hundreds of cottages. One of the most famous estates in the dukeries, Rufford abbey never nev-er has been in the market before, and its forthcoming sale will be one of the outstanding transactions of recent re-cent years in real estate. Lands at Rufford were recorded long before Domesday, but its history as an ab bey began in 1148, when Gilbert de Gaunt; Earl of Lincoln, founded an abbey there, dedicated it to the honor hon-or of the Blessed Virgin Mary and colonized it with Cistercian monks from Rievaulx abbey. The abbey lands increased, and from the earliest times the monks enjoyed special privileges in the surrounding sur-rounding Forest of Sherwood. The abbots became rich enough to entertain enter-tain royalty, and September 18, 1290, Rufford received the first of many subsequent royal visitors; Edward I passed a night there and sealed a variety of documents. The rich abbey attracted the attention at-tention of Henry VIII's commissioners commission-ers when he was considering the dissolution dis-solution of the monasteries and in 1537 he annexed the abbey and gave it and all its lands to George, earl of Shrewsbury, with whose descendants descend-ants it ever since has remained. Thus began Rufford abbey's 400-year 400-year existence as a country house. The chapel of the abbey was the scene of the wedding in 1574 of Charles Stuart, younger brother of Darnley, and Elizabeth Cavendish. |
