Furness Abbey stands in isolated medieval splendor on the outskirts of Barrow in Furness. Founded by Stephen of Blois in 1127, in what was then a wild and uninhabited area, it was first colonized by monks from Savigny in Normandy. This reformed order was similar to the Cistercians who absorbed it 20 years later, in 1147.

The austerity of the Savigniac order is reflected in its architecture: plain, practical, but not without a certain severe elegance. The original church at Furness was rebuilt in about 1160, and it is the remains of this second building that now dominate the site. The crossing and both transept arms are, miraculously, almost intact; only the wooden roof that would once have covered them is lacking.

Furness was not the most lavish of Stephen's dozen or so foundations. That was Faversham, a Cluniac abbey in Kent, founded in 1148 when he was king of England, and intended to be his burial place to rival Reading Abbey, Henry I's mausoleum. Tragically, both those monuments to royal wealth and dynastic pride have vanished almost without trace.

Stephen was quite outshone as a patron of the arts by his brother Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester, abbot of Glastonbury, and papal legate, who played a key role in English politics and whose patronage was almost on the scale of a Renaissance prince. Henry bought antique sculptures in Rome to decorate his episcopal palace and conmmissioned numerous buildings, all sadly destroyed,

manuscripts like the Winchester Bible, perhaps the finest book produced in England in the Middle Ages, and gilded and bejewelled altars and crosses.

Attaches to one small portable altar were two gilded and enamelled plaques which show Henry himself presenting his altar to heaven, surrounded by inscriptions which make no pretence to false modesty:

'May the Angel take the giver to heaven for his gifts, but not just yet, lest England groan for it, since on him it depends for peace or war, agitation or rest.

'Art comes before gold and gems, the author before everything. Henry, alive in bronze, gives gifts to God. Henry, whose fame commends him to men, whose character commends him to the heavens, a man equal in mind to the Muses, and in eloquence higher than Marcus.'