The fourteen Cistercian abbeys—eight in Yorkshire, two in North Lancashire, two in Cumberland, one in Northumberland, and one in Nottinghamshire—that constituted the northern province of the order, comprised a third of all the Cistercian monasteries in medieval England. There were, in addition, no fewer than the fifteen nunneries—thirteen in Yorkshire, one in county Durham, and one in Newcastle upon Tyne—that in the later Middle Ages claimed to be following the Cistercian rule. With the exception of Whalley, not founded until 1296, all were established in the twelfth century. With annual revenues of over £1,000 at the dissolution, Fountains and Furness were immensely wealthy, while the majority of the abbeys had incomes of between £200 and £500 a year, with only two, Sawley and Calder, with incomes of less than the £200 deemed necessary in 1536 for fulfilling the religious life. The nunneries enjoyed none of these advantages. Swine, the best endowed, had an annual income of a little over £83; Nun Appleton, Hampole, and Sinningthwaite incomes in excess of £60; but all the rest, with incomes below £40, were very poor, the five with incomes of under £20 a year desperately so.

Until relatively recently, historians routinely regarded the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the great age of Cistercian monasticism and dismissed the period from the fourteenth century onwards as an era of decline. In the meticulously researched The Art and Architecture of the Cistercians in Northern England, c.1300–1540, Michael Carter adopts a much more nuanced approach, contending that the Cistercians, like the Benedictines and Augustinians, necessarily evolved over time, and that the significant investment in art and architecture made by the Cistercian houses in the north of England in the two centuries before their suppression demonstrates their continuing commitment to ideals of their order.

Particularly in the disposition of their monasteries, the Cistercians had little choice but to adapt to current needs. In the mid thirteenth century, Meaux, for example, had as many as ninety lay brothers working on its lands; a century later it had only seven and after the Black Death none at all. Rather than managing their granges in hand in the later medieval period, all the abbeys had gone over to leasing their estates to tenants. The extinction of the lay brothers meant alternative uses had to be found not only for those areas of the monastic site where they had once lived but also for the parts of abbey churches in which they had worshipped. At Sawley, the community took the drastic decision to demolish the nave; more generally naves became the sites for new altars and liturgical processions.

By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Cistercian General Chapter had replaced previous restrictions on images, luxurious vestments, figurative glass windows, manuscript painting, and bell towers with a general admonition against superfluous innovations, and the Cistercian houses in the north of England certainly seem to have taken advantage of the relaxation. Bell towers at Meaux, Whalley, and Holm Cultram date from the fourteenth century. All the abbeys possessed multiple images of the Virgin, the patron of their order. Grave slabs in the monastic choir, which initially had merely recorded the abbot's name, gradually became more elaborate, incorporating first crosiers and then architectural canopies and heraldry. An ornate set of late fifteenth-century mass vestments has survived for Whalley.

Compared with the abbeys, which with the exception of Calder had the resources to finance architectural and artistic developments, the meagerly endowed nunneries were far more dependent upon lay donors. Unlike Furness, where the abbot in 1412 could well afford to sponsor one of his own monks to produce a richly illuminated cartulary, Hampole only acquired its equally splendid psalter through the generosity of Lady Elizabeth Vernon. When the nunnery subsequently went on to refurbish its buildings, its benefactors apparently included the Percy family, among others. At Swine Sir George Darcy, the successor of the Hiltons as the convent's patron, contributed with other gentlemen toward the cost of the church's two Renaissance screens in around 1531.

Northern Cistercian abbots similarly continued to beautify their houses until the state stopped them in their tracks. In the early years of the sixteenth century, the reforming abbot of Fountains, Marmaduke Huby, the owner of a sumptuous printed Renaissance breviary of the Cistercian rite, began building his great tower inscribed with texts from the Cistercian breviary and his personal motto Soli deo honor et gloria (to God alone be the honor and glory). Around the same time at Holm Cultram, Robert Chamber added a porch to the west front of the abbey church and somewhat later commissioned the tomb chest on which he appears in person conferring a blessing on his monastic community. Jervaulx procured a richly embroidered vestment in about 1531 and erected a new screen in the abbey church only months before the outbreak of the Pilgrimage of Grace.

Between 1536 and 1540, the government suppressed every one of these monasteries and confiscated all their goods. Some still stand in their ruined state, but of the majority scarcely a stone remains. Carter has assembled much fresh material on the later history of the order in the north of England has been assembled in this study, and he deserves particular praise for elucidating the Cistercian spirituality that underlaid their art and architecture until the very end. In addition to eight color plates, the volume contains a wealth of black-and-white illustrations, a very detailed bibliography, and a full index.