Strata Florida Project

History of Strata Florida

The Cistercian abbey of Strata Florida was part of the Whitland family of monastic houses established in Pura Wallia under the aegis of powerful Welsh lords in the twelfth century.  Its inspiration lay in the great movement begun at Cîteaux in Burgundy at the end of the 11th century.  The Cistercian's return to the asceticism of the Rule of St Benedict, its seeking of the waste places of the world, and its call to a Christian self-sufficiency through ora et labor (prayer and work), captured the imagination of Western Christendom, not least in Wales where the suppression and reform of the similar traditions of the pre-Norman Episcopal monastery (1135) was still fresh in the memory. 

Strata Florida lies in a small valley on the western slopes of the Cambrian Mountains, north of Tregaron, and is a transcendently immanent place, perhaps from a time before the Cistercians arrived, but certainly even after they left, and today is still the source of a powerful hiraeth in the emotion and spirit of Wales.

Photo: Page from the manuscript of the Brut y Tywyosogion (NLW Peniarth MS 20, 210b). (Copyright: NLW)

Perhaps because of this and because of its Welsh royal patron, Strata Florida rapidly became a centre of a growing ideology of Welshness and, inheriting some of the traditions of a pre-Norman church, it created manuscripts in Welsh, including the great history of early Wales, Brut y Tywysogion (The Chronicle of the Princes) and supported the literary and sculptural arts.  First founded in 1164 by an Anglo-Norman knight, it was, within the space of a year, appropriated and given vast endowments of land by the Lord Rhys of Deheubarth.

Its hey-day was the late 12th and 13th centuries, prior to the overwhelming of Wales by Edward I of England.  At that time it established its reputation in scholasticism and political affiliation and as a centre of healing and spiritual well-being.  From the later 13th century onwards it was always in some state of decline, although it survived intact as one of the greater monastic houses until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539.  After that its lands were taken over first by Sir Richard Devereux, and then gradually by local gentry families.  The Stedmans, who first leased and then purchased the Abbey itself and some of its demesne lands, may originally have been officials of the Devereux Earls of Essex, but were soon integrated within the local gentry networks. 

Photo: Effigy of the Lord Rhys ap Gruffudd (St David's Cathedral, 14th c tomb). (Copyright: CADW).

It was the Stedmans who built the plas or mansion on the site of the Abbey Refectory and this passed in the mid 18th century to the Powells of Nanteos and later to the Vaughans of Trawscoed, and finally to the Arch family, the present owners.  In the 1880s the site of the Abbey Church and Cloisters was excavated by Stephen Williams, a railway engineer, and this became in 1931 a guardianship monument, now in the care of Cadw on behalf of the Welsh Government.

Photo left: The front of Mynachlog Fawr farmhouse, the former plas of the Stedman family. 

Photo right: Plan of Strata Florida Abbey church and cloisters.