[4] Richard had been granted the manor of Hailes by King Henry, and settled it with a group of twenty Cistercian monks and ten lay brothers, led by Prior Jordan, from Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire.

[5][6] The great Cistercian abbey was entirely built in a single campaign in 1277, and was consecrated in a royal ceremony that included the King and Queen and 15 bishops.

[5] Hailes Abbey became a site of pilgrimage after Richard's son Edmund donated to the Cistercian community a phial of the Holy Blood, purchased in Germany, in 1270.

[7] Though King Henry VIII's commissioners declared the famous relic to be nothing but the blood of a duck,[8] regularly renewed, and though the Abbot, Stephen Sagar, admitted that the Holy Blood was a fake in hope of saving the Abbey, Hailes Abbey was one of the last religious institutions to acquiesce following the Suppression of Religious Houses Act 1535.

[6] Following the Dissolution, the west range consisting of the Abbot's own apartments was converted into a house and was home to the Tracy family in the seventeenth century, but these buildings were later demolished and now all that remains are a few low arches in a meadow with outlines in the grass.

[6] In 1937 the site was donated to the National Trust and in 1948 the Ministry of Works, a predecessor of English Heritage, assumed responsibility for the abbey.