NEWENHAM
Roche was founded in 1147 and building began on the stone church in about 1170. Although never a large or wealthy abbey, Roche built up a moderate collection of land-holdings during the twelfth and thirteenth century and played a significant part in the history of the region in the later middle ages.In 1246 Reginald de Mohun, lord of Dunster, who sometimes styled himself earl of Somerset, invited Abbot Acius of Beaulieu to choose between three sites in Devon, one of which would then provide the setting for the establishment of a new daughter-house. For example, Roche Abbey, Maltby, was a daughter-house of Newminster Abbey, from which it was founded. The ruins of Roche Abbey lie in the wooded valley of the Maltby Beck, about 9 miles from Doncaster and 13 miles from Sheffield in South Yorkshire. But this was once a splendid twelfth-century church, one of the earliest built in the ‘New Gothic’ style in northern England. Abbot Acius chose a site on a tributary of the River Axe and Reginald de Mohun thus organised the lands and endowments for the new settlement of NEWENHAM. Thirteen monks and four lay-brothers arrived at the site in January 1247. In 1349 the Black Death killed twenty monks and three lay-brothers, leaving a community of just three. At the time of the Dissolution the annual net income of the house was valued at £227 and the abbey was dissolved with the larger monasteries in 1539.