Of these documents, the longest and most interesting is the contemporary account of the foundation--_Narratio de fundatione Fontanis Monasterii_. It was written by Hugh, a monk of the daughter house of Kirkstall, upon information given him by Serlo, an aged brother then resident in that abbey, who had once lived at Fountains. Serlo was almost a hundred years old when he sat in the sun in the cloister of Kirkstall, and told this story of his early days, answering Hugh’s questions. “It is now,” he says, “the sixty-ninth year of my conversion. When I first went to Fountains to associate myself to that holy brotherhood, I was, as I remember, about beginning my thirtieth year.” The Abbey, at that time, as he tells us in another place, was five years old; but he had been acquainted with the brethren before. “When the monks left the monastery of York, I myself was present. I had known their names and faces from my boyhood; I was born in their country, was brought up amongst them, and to several of them I was related by ties of blood. And although I am, as thou may see, far advanced in years, I am very grateful to my old age that my memory remains unimpaired, and particularly retentive of those things committed to it in early years. Such things, therefore, relating to the origin of the Monastery of Fountains, which I personally witnessed, or have gathered from the credible report of my elders, I will now relate.” Serlo spent ten years at Fountains, leaving in 1147, with the colony which founded Kirkstall. After that, the chronicler writes not from personal observation, but from near acquaintance. There would naturally be frequent communication between the mother and the daughter house. The reminiscences end with the death of the sixth abbot, in 1190. Thence the history proceeds, by the hand of Hugh and others, to recount the administration of the seventh and eighth abbots, and mention is made in the last sentence of the ninth and tenth.