Henry VIII closed the monasteries of England and Wales between 1536 and 1540. I traced 808 of them to what stands on their sites today, then tested an old guidebook claim: that the Cistercians chose wild, empty places.
Every ruined abbey in Britain has the same opening scene. The commissioners arrive, the monks sign the surrender, the lead comes off the roof, and the stone is carted off to build somebody's house. But that is the story of the ruins, and ruins are only one of the things that happened. Some abbey churches became cathedrals. Many more became the parish church. Some were turned into country houses that still carry the word Abbey on the gate. Some became farms, schools, pubs and car parks. Many vanished.
I wanted to see the whole pattern rather than the famous few. So I built a list of every religious house closed between 1536 and 1540 that I could find in the Wikipedia county lists of monastic houses and in Wikidata: 808 of them, 763 in England and 45 in Wales. For each one I recorded the order, the year it closed, and what the lists say about the site now.
Then I used the same map to test something guidebooks say about the Cistercians, the white monks of Fountains, Rievaulx and Tintern: that they sought out remote, empty valleys, far from other people. Domesday Book gives a census of sorts for 1086, before almost all Cistercian houses were founded, so I can ask how many households lived near each future abbey site before the monks arrived.
Each symbol is a religious house, coloured by its order. The shape says what is on the site now: a spire for a cathedral, a cross for a church still in use, a roof for a house, a broken arch for a ruin, an empty ring where nothing visible is left. Tap a symbol for the details and the words of the list it came from. Filter by order or by fate, or search for a house.
The closures came in two waves. The Act of 1536 took the smaller houses, those worth less than £200 a year: 194 houses in my list closed in 1536 and 56 in 1537. Then came the great surrenders, house by house. 280 houses closed in 1538, the year the friars went: 146 of the 189 friaries in my list closed that year. 221 more closed in 1539, the Benedictines' worst year (74 of their houses), and the last 57 in 1540, among them 18 houses of the Knights Hospitaller and other military orders.
For 499 houses the lists say clearly what is on the site now. Among those, the most common fate is a house: 122 sites (24%) have a mansion, manor house or other home built on or out of the monastery, sometimes now a hotel. Close behind come churches still in use: 109 sites (22%), where the nave, the choir, or a later church on the same ground still serves a parish. Another 15 became or remain cathedrals.
Ruins, the image we all carry, account for 78 sites (16%). Nothing visible is left at 82 (16%), and only earthworks at 13. In all, 81% of the sites with a recorded fate still have something standing, and 65% are in some kind of use. Just four are monasteries again.
That leaves a large grey area, and I want to be plain about it. For 221 houses the list rows say nothing about the present, and for 88 more the only clue is that Wikidata records a listed building or scheduled monument on the site, which tells us something survives but not what. The shares above are shares of the houses with a recorded fate, not of all of them.
The orders met very different ends. The Benedictines, the oldest order, often sat in towns with a parish attached, and their great churches were the easiest to keep: 36% of Benedictine sites with a recorded fate have a church in use, and 9% are cathedrals. The Cistercians are the opposite. Their churches served no parish, and a third of their sites (33%) are ruins. The friars, in the middle of towns, were built over: 40% of friary sites with a recorded fate have nothing visible left.
And the country houses kept their names. 39 of the 122 houses on monastic sites carry a monastic word in the name the list gives them, 21 of them "Abbey":
The Cistercian rule told monks to build far from towns and villages, and the order's own writers liked to describe their sites as wilderness. Guidebooks repeat it. Wikipedia's article on the order says the thirteen Cistercian houses in Wales were "all in remote locations". But a founder's grant was usually land someone already owned and farmed, and some Cistercian houses are said to have moved or cleared villages to make way for their granges. So how empty were these places before the monks came?
Domesday Book (1086) records the households of thousands of places in England, 13,068 of which can be located today. It was made a generation or more before the first Cistercian house in England in 1128. For every house in the parts of England where the survey gives household counts, I added up the 1086 households recorded within 5 km. Because some counties were far busier than others in 1086, I then ranked each site against 400 random spots in its own county. A site at the 50th percentile was exactly as busy as a typical spot in that county; a site at the 10th was emptier than nine in ten.
The answer is a qualified yes, and the qualification matters. The typical Cistercian monastery stood at the 50th percentile of its county: about as busy as an ordinary spot in the countryside. The Benedictine monks' houses stood at the 66th, the Augustinian canons' at the 56th and the friars, who wanted towns, at the 76th. In raw numbers, the typical Cistercian site had 142 households recorded within 5 km in 1086, against 208 for Benedictine monks.
The Cistercians did not find the wilderness. They found ordinary countryside, while everyone else was in the villages and towns.
The gap is real but modest. Comparing houses in the same county, Cistercian sites had about 27% fewer 1086 households within 5 km than Benedictine sites (95% interval 5% to 44% fewer). Only 18% of Cistercian sites were in the emptiest quarter of their county, hardly more than the 15% of Benedictine sites. The order with genuinely empty sites was a different one: the Carthusians, the near-hermit monks of houses such as Mount Grace and Hinton, at the 28th percentile, though there are only seven of them in the comparison.
Yorkshire, the Cistercian heartland, needs a warning. Much of it was recorded as waste in 1086 after William the Conqueror's harrying of the north, so every kind of house there sat in thin country. Within Yorkshire the nine Cistercian sites and eight Benedictine sites look alike (the 74th and 79th percentiles of their county). Outside Yorkshire the gap is clearer: the 42th against the 63th. If I widen the test to every house in the lists with a known order, whenever it closed, the picture holds: the 49th percentile for 94 Cistercian sites against the 60th for 279 Benedictine ones.
Where the Cistercians do stand out is in the ground itself. Their sites sit higher (a median of 60 m against 30 m for Benedictine monks) in hillier country: the ground within 1 km rises and falls by 36 m against 26 m. In Wales, where Domesday is silent, the difference is starker: 147 m of relief around the thirteen Cistercian houses against 63 m around the eight Benedictine ones. The white monks' valleys were steep, and that may be what made them feel remote.
Two Cistercian houses stood 11 km apart in the Ribble valley. Sawley was founded in 1147 as a daughter house of Newminster in Northumberland, and Wikipedia calls it "a relatively poor establishment". Whalley's monks came from Stanlow on the Mersey estuary, moving to Whalley in 1296. Both were caught up in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the great northern rising of 1536.
on 12 October, supported by the rebels, the monks returned to the empty abbey.
it is now the Retreat and Conference House of the Diocese of Blackburn of the Church of England.
Sawley was closed in 1536 as a small house, and its monks were put back in by the rebels that October. Whalley's last abbot, Paslew, was executed for high treason for his part in events around the rising, and the abbey was taken in March 1537. Today their afterlives split along the usual lines. Sawley is a ruin, open to the public in English Heritage's care. At Whalley only the foundations of the church remain, a large house was built where the abbot's house and infirmary stood, a gateway is listed Grade I, and the whole is a retreat and conference house of the Church of England. My Domesday comparison cannot reach either: modern Lancashire has almost no household counts in the survey. Domesday Book does name seven places within 5 km of Sawley and three within 5 km of Whalley, so neither valley was empty of settlement.
The houses. The core list is the set of English Wikipedia county lists of monastic houses: 46 English county pages and the Welsh page. The analysis machine could reach only GitHub, so I read each English page with a web reader instructed to copy, row by row, the name, the status mark after it, the communities in bold, the words after "dissolved", every later-use clause verbatim, and the coordinates. The Welsh and Lancashire pages were also available as raw wikitext, which I parsed directly. As a check, the reader's copy of the Lancashire page agreed with the raw wikitext on all 28 rows for the status mark, the order and the year. The Isle of Wight page could not be fetched, so its houses come from Wikidata only.
I read 1,941 rows, dropped 64 cross-references to other counties and merged 8 rows that describe the same house twice. I joined each row to the Wikidata items for UK monasteries (1,225 in England and Wales) by name and distance, which adds listed-building and scheduled-monument designations, and added three houses closed 1536 to 1541 that are in Wikidata but not in the lists. Where both give coordinates, the median gap is 36 m and 88% agree within 500 m. The main set is every house whose closing year falls in 1536 to 1541: 808 houses. Wikipedia's article on the Dissolution says there were "nearly 900" religious houses in England, so my 763 English houses are roughly 85% of that figure. Part of the gap is surely among the 681 list rows that give no dissolution year at all, which I leave out.
The fate of each site. I classified the list's later-use text with fixed rules, in this order of priority: cathedral; monastery again; church in use; house or hotel; school or college; farm; other use (museum, inn, shops, offices and so on); ruin (including sites in the care of English Heritage, Cadw or the National Trust); earthworks only; nothing visible. Clauses that describe the past ("until", "demolished", "possibly") do not count. The list's own marks are used too: + (church use), ^ (other use), $ (earthworks), # (no trace), * (monastic). Where the list is silent, Wikidata's "monastery ruins" and "destroyed monastery" types fill in, and a protected designation alone gives "protected, use unrecorded". Everything else is "unclear". In a random check of 40 classified houses against their source text, I judged 39 consistent; two earlier rounds of checking were used to improve the rules. Each house's deciding phrase is in the data file, so any call can be checked.
The order. The last community the list names before closure (so a Savigniac house that became Cistercian in 1147 counts as Cistercian). Nunneries are kept separate where the order allows. Friars of every kind are grouped together, as are the Templars and Hospitallers.
1086 households. From the Hull Domesday Project's data as joined to Open Domesday places in the realm-domesday repository and my Domesday Destiny project: households recorded for every located Domesday place within 5 km of the site. Random comparison points: 400 per county, drawn inside the county outline. The regression is ordinary least squares on log(1 + households) with a fixed effect for each county and robust standard errors. Height and relief come from AWS Terrain Tiles (about 100 m pixels here); relief is the range of ground height across the site and 16 points 500 m and 1 km away.
The Wikipedia lists are a volunteer compilation, uneven from county to county, and their notes on the present state of a site are often silent or out of date. My rules read words, not stones: a "house built on site" may hold no medieval fabric at all. Domesday Book is not a census, it is thin in the north and silent for Wales, much of Lancashire, London and Winchester, and it describes 1086, decades before most of these houses existed and centuries before they closed. The comparison says where the monks settled relative to where people lived in 1086, not whether they later emptied the land around them.
Related: Is Domesday Destiny?, which uses the same 1086 households, and Lost Villages.