A man of great sanctity and of outstanding
judgement … that
man had
climbed so high as to be called a second Bede and truly in his
day,
by his predecessors both in life and learning he alone could
be compared with
Bede.(2)
Before he took the Cistercian habit at Rievaulx
Abbey, c. 1138, Maurice was a monk of the Benedictine cathedral
priory of
Durham,
where he held the office of sub-prior and was highly reputed for
his learning.
Maurice officiated as cantor of Rievaulx and
later as abbot. However, he only held this post
for eighteen months for when Henry
Murdac, the
abbot of Fountains, was elevated
to the see of York, he chose Maurice as his successor. Maurice
resigned from the abbacy of Fountains after only three months in
office. He returned for a
time to Rievaulx but probably withdrew elsewhere until his death
some time after 1163, i.e. after the death of Aelred
of Rievaulx.
Several of Maurice’s works are listed
in Rievaulx’s
late twelfth / early thirteenth-century library catalogue and include
his ‘Apologia’,
sermons, soliloquies, letters and a tract on the translation of St Cuthbert in
1104.(3) None of these is known to survive, except
for a letter from Thomas Becket to a Maurice of Rievaulx, requesting prayers.
This was written shortly after
Becket’s appointment to the see of Canterbury in 1162, and if the Maurice
can be equated with the former abbot of Rievaulx and Fountains, this suggests
that Maurice was then – if not now – widely known and highly reputed.(4) Interestingly
it was Hugh de Moreville, one of Thomas Becket’s companions (and one of
the four who later murdered the archbishop in 1170), who travelled to the abbey
to deliver this letter.