Congratulations!

The Museum Manager at Bordesley Abbey Museum has chosen you and your classmates to do some important research for her.
She is in charge of the ruin of Bordesley Abbey, which was an important Cistercian monastery in Medieval times. The Manager wants to develop the site and attract more visitors. The problem is, the abbey was pulled down to just above ground level at the 'Dissolution' in Henry VIII's reign, so it is hard for people who visit nowdays to imagine what it must have looked like in it's heyday in Medieval times. The Manager has employed a graphic designer to build a virtual reality Bordesley Abbey, showing how it looked in about 1300, but they need you to do the research first and evaluate the information you gather!

The Cistercians were members of an order of monks founded at Citeaux, in France in the late 11th century. They wore white robes to distinquish them from the black-robed Benedictine monks. The early Cistercians thought the Benedictines were too wealthy and their monasteries too richly decorated. The Cistercians preferred to live a simple life with few possessions and basic food, in plain, bare buildings. They wanted to be self sufficient and often chose to settle in lonely places away from towns.
Bordesley was founded in about 1138 with 12 monks. By the year 1330, there were 60 people at Bordesley, 34 monks and a novice, 8 lay brothers and 17 serving men were living and working there. Just two years earlier, the King of England, Edward III stayed at Bordesley with his entourage.

As the chosen research team, your responsibility is to find relevant information, which is accurate and detailed enough to hand over to the graphic artist. Their job then, is to create a virtual reality window into the past. When it is finished, it will be an exciting resources for visitors, who will be able to see what Bordesley Abbey was actually like for the first time since 1538!

You have a vital part to play in making a success of this!