 The monastery was built for a rector and twenty canons who formed, according to the sixteenth-century historian Polydore Vergil, "a new order not before seen in England, and called the Boni homines".It was finished in 1285.At the foundation of the abbey the Edmund, 2nd Earl of Cornwall donated, among other things, a phial of Christ's blood, in honour of which the St Margaret's Convent, adjacent to the abbey, was founded.