John, Constable of Chester, in 15 Henry II. (1163), founded a monastery of the Cistercian Order at Stanlawe, in Cheshire, and having endowed it, he instructed that it should be called _Locus Benedictus_. The situation selected was not a happy one, as not only was the soil barren and unfruitful, but a considerable portion of it was liable to periodical encroachments by the sea, which at spring tide almost surrounded it. After almost a century, the monks--when the monks had become considerably richer by the acquisition of properties, chiefly in Lancashire--decided to remove the abbey to a more convenient site, and ultimately fixed upon Whalley. This translation was, no doubt, hastened by the destruction of a great part of Stanlawe Abbey by fire in 1289, but it was not until April 4, 1296, that Gregory, the eighth Abbot of Stanlawe, and his convent took formal possession of the parsonage of Whalley, where they continued to live until the new monastery was erected. Here they found one of the oldest church foundations in Lancashire, which probably dated back to the time when Christianity was first introduced into the district; it was originally known as the White Church, and in its churchyard still remain three very fine specimens of Saxon crosses. The church was another of the Northern erections dedicated to St. Wilfrid, and at the time the monks settled there it had been rebuilt, and was a good sample of Norman ecclesiastical architecture. Amongst their other possessions the monks held the impropriate rectories of Whalley, Blackburn and Rochdale, with the right of presentment to their vicarages and chapels of ease. Attached to Whalley were the chapels of Clitheroe, Colne, Burnley, Altham, Downham, Church and Haslingden. Whalley now (to quote the language of its historian)[182] "became the seat of an establishment which continued for two centuries and a half to exercise unbounded hospitality and charity; to adorn the site which had been chosen with a succession of magnificent buildings; to protect the tenants of its ample domains in the enjoyment of independence and plenty; to educate and provide for their children; to employ, clothe, feed and pay many labourers, herdsmen and shepherds; to exercise the arts and cultivate the learning of the times; yet, unfortunately, at the expense of the secular incumbents, whose endowments they had swallowed up and whose functions they had degraded into those of pensionary vicars or mendicant chaplains." Notwithstanding the great abuses that gradually crept into these and the other monastic houses, and ultimately brought about their destruction, there is still much truth in the _dictum_ of the learned author.