The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (29 page)

When they get up for the Work of God, they may quietly encourage one another since the sleepy are given to making excuses.

We read that wine is not at all a drink for monks, yet, since in our days it is impossible to persuade monks of this, let us agree … that we should not drink our fill, but more sparingly.

Clothing should be given to the brethren according to the nature of the district where they live and the climate, because in cold places more is needed and in warm ones less.
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A rule couched in these terms had obvious appeal: it did not make excessive demands upon its adherents and it could be adapted to meet local conditions. Accordingly, Benedictine monasticism spread rapidly through western Europe from the sixth century onwards, superseding previous rules, often with government encouragement in the interests of promoting stability and conformity. So when Edgar (king of the whole of England from 959 to 975) and his senior ecclesiastics deliberately revived monasticism in England following its total collapse during the conflicts with the Vikings, it was determined that every new house was to follow Benedict’s
Rule
. By the end of the tenth century, there were about 30 houses of monks and eight houses of nuns in the kingdom, all Benedictine.
⁵

By then, some of the simplicity of the original
Rule
had been lost, with monks spending more time in worship and far less time on agricultural work than initially envisaged. As they spread through Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries, Benedictine houses were well-endowed with land, inevitably bringing them into daily contact with their local society and economy. Far from being self-sufficient communities which could survive whatever storms were raging beyond the monastic gatehouse, they became landlords of peasants, employers of servants and regional centres of learning, offering prayers for their benefactors and hospitality to travellers but necessarily bound up with the political and economic vicissitudes which affected everyday life. And in the absence – till 1215 – of anything resembling a constitution to bind the members of the order together, ‘families’ developed: houses which shared a common interpretation of the
Rule
, following a particular model. By the Norman Conquest there were some 40 abbeys of Benedictine monks in England, which between them held about one-sixth of the landed wealth of the country: places like Westminster, Ely, Peterborough, Crowland (
Figure 24
) and St Augustine’s Canterbury were major corporate institutions, others such as Christ Church Canterbury and Worcester also served as cathedrals. The 13 Benedictine nunneries at this time were less well-endowed.
⁶

Figure 24: Crowland Abbey (Lincolnshire)
. The abbey and village occupied an island above the surrounding fenland, which in its undrained condition grew no corn within 8 kilometres but was rich in fish, fowl and pastures. The monks had several territorial disputes with neighbouring houses of the same Benedictine Order over this valuable ’unimproved’ land.

One significant contribution made by these pre-Conquest Benedictine houses was to popularize a ‘standard monastic plan’, whereby church and ancillary buildings were arranged around secluded cloisters. The key features of this plan are found in a ninth-century manuscript kept at St Gall, Switzerland, and nearly all religious orders went on to adopt it, unless their particular circumstances dictated otherwise. The cloisters – a courtyard with a surrounding covered walkway – were usually located on the sunnier, southern side of the church, with a chapter-house (for meetings) and communal
dorter or dormitory on the eastern side, communal frater or refectory on the side opposite the church, and storerooms and various types of alternative accommodation to the west. Additional rooms typically included a calefactory (warming-room) and parlour (where talking was allowed) usually along the eastern range, a kitchen positioned near the refectory, a rere-dorter (latrines) as an extension to the dorter, and an infirmary located separately away from the cloisters; a covered passage through the eastern side, the slype, gave access to buildings and cemetery beyond. Anyone visiting a medieval monastic site today will encounter this plan time and again, to the point where signage is hardly necessary, but also worth looking out for are the elaborate water management systems which underpinned it, such as the conduits and channels which provided drinking water and serviced the
lavatorium
(the trough for washing hands before entering the frater), kitchens, baths and rere-dorter.
⁷

From 1066, England was linked to a duchy which had itself witnessed a monastic revival since the turn of the millennium. This led to a certain ‘Normanization’ of English religious houses, in matters such as the personnel appointed as abbots, modifications to the liturgy and the imposition of military quotas on several larger foundations, obliging them to distribute portions of
their estates to knights who would fulfil this commitment. But the newly enriched conquerors – profiting from the acquisition of a kingdom four times the size of Normandy – proved to be enthusiastic benefactors, and by 1100 there were about 150 Benedictine houses in England, all but 17 of them for monks. Many of these were subordinate priories or cells administering estates given to Norman mother houses, such as Clare (Suffolk) and Frampton (Dorset), dependencies of Bec and of St Stephen’s Caen respectively. But some were major independent abbeys, among them Battle, founded by the Conqueror himself in 1067 on the site of his victory the previous year – colonized by monks from Marmoutier – and Shrewsbury, established by the local earl Roger de Montgomery about 1087 and colonized from Séez. Again, the nunneries they founded were fewer in number and smaller in scale, but Elstow (Bedfordshire), established by the Conqueror’s niece Countess Judith about 1078, was to grow into a house of some size, with 19 nuns in residence as late as 1442. Of particular significance were the new foundations which – for the first time – carried Benedictine monasticism north of the Humber, such as Selby about 1070, Whitby about 1080, Tynemouth about 1083, and St Mary’s York about 1086; Benedictine monks were also introduced to the cathedral at Durham in 1083.
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The Benedictines continued to prosper after 1100, to the extent that by the population climax of the early fourteenth century they had some 225 houses of monks and 80 houses of nuns in England and Wales as a whole. However, from the early twelfth century onwards they were competing for benefactors and recruits with alternative orders and most of the subsequent new foundations were small-scale, often dependent priories intended to manage distant landholdings. The abbeys of Reading (founded in 1121) and Faversham (1148), established by Kings Henry I and Stephen respectively, were well-endowed exceptions.
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All this had a major impact in the form of intense building activity. It has been well said that ‘the sheer volume of construction in the first generation after the Conquest must have turned the country into a vast building site’ and it certainly made an impression upon contemporaries. The early twelfth-century Benedictine monk William of Malmesbury, for example, described the monasteries ‘ancient in religion but modern in their buildings’ which now peppered the landscape, while acknowledging ‘the mutterings of those who say it would have been better if the old had been preserved in their original state than new ones raised from their demolition and plunder’. Thus, a new church was begun in 1070 at the monastic cathedral of Christ Church, Canterbury by the incoming Norman archbishop Lanfranc, to a design based on that of the abbey at Caen from which he had been recruited. Similarly, at St Albans in 1077, the arrival as abbot of Lanfranc’s nephew Paul, a monk of Caen, immediately signalled the commencement of a new church. These examples could be multiplied time and again, but it would be wrong to
associate the reconstruction effort solely with newcomers from Normandy: from 1084, the monastic cathedral at Worcester had its pre-Conquest church replaced by Bishop Wulfstan, one of the few English prelates to retain his position.
¹⁰
Whatever the sentiment, the result of all this activity was that architecture characteristic of Norman Romanesque proliferated across the country, still recognizable most obviously in round-headed doorways and arcading, often with minimalist, geometrical, decoration, by apsidal east ends sometimes accompanied by radiating chapels, and (in the rare cases where these have survived later alteration) by tiny, very narrow, vertical window openings. The style continued to dominate ecclesiastical architecture in England until the last quarter of the twelfth century, and among the finest examples still to be seen of its deployment in a monastic context are the nave of Peterborough, the transepts at Ely and the nave, tower and west front of Tewkesbury
(
Figure 22
).
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After the Conquest as before, Benedictine houses formed themselves into ‘families’, following particular elaborations of the original
Rule
. Detailed
Constitutions
drawn up by Lanfranc for the monks of Christ Church Priory, Canterbury,
¹²
for example, were adopted by several other abbeys, among them Battle, Crowland, Durham and St Albans. The story of monasticism from hereon is largely one of groups of monasteries which chose to take the Rule in a particular direction, sometimes to the extent that they were eventually recognized by the papacy as a separate order. This happened, for example, with the houses which modelled themselves on the Benedictine abbey of Cluny in Burgundy, founded in 910, which established a reputation for its zealous observance of lengthy and magnificent ritual and grew rich from the endowments of those eager to benefit from the prayers of the monks. By the end of the tenth century, these Cluniac houses had become a distinct, papally authorized order, with a constitution which signalled their subordination to Cluny: hence the designation of most of them as priories rather than autonomous abbeys. There were nine houses of monks in England by 1100, 35 by the early fourteenth century. Among the earliest were the priories of Lewes (Sussex), Castle Acre (Norfolk) and Much Wenlock (Shropshire), all founded between 1077 and 1089. Their architecture tells us much about the Cluniac approach, which assumed that a monk worked hard for most of his waking hours at communal worship, offering prayers on behalf of the living and the dead, so was entitled to eat well and to dwell in large, well-appointed, buildings. Accordingly, we find the completion of the church at Castle Acre in the 1160s heralded by an elaborately decorated west front, dominated by blind arcading. Similarly at Much Wenlock, although the ostentation of the church itself can only be glimpsed in fragments, there is some fine blind arcading of about 1140 in an interior wall of the chapter house, where the rounded arches interlock to create a precocious pointed-arch effect.
¹³

Such ostentation was anathema to another order which traced its origins to a Benedictine house in Burgundy, the Cistercians. The story here is of a group of monks breaking away from their community at Molesme in 1098 and settling in the woods at a place they called Citeaux from the ‘boggy ground’ they found there. Under their first abbot, Alberic, the monks sought to revive a literal interpretation of the
Rule of St Benedict
, stripped of all the elaborations which had accumulated over the centuries. They wore a grey-white habit of undyed wool, unlike the black habits of the Cluniacs and their fellow-Benedictines, so came to be known as the ‘White Monks’. They simplified the church services and restored manual work so that the monks had a day divided into three roughly equal parts (worship, manual work and private study), as originally envisaged by Benedict. They also tried to avoid anything not specified in the Rule. All this made for a life of simplicity and austerity, which other houses in the area duly took as their model to follow. But what turned the Cistercian fraternity into a distinct order, and a highly successful one at that, was, first, the provision of a constitution which facilitated expansion while retaining control from the centre, and, second, a brilliant propaganda campaign. The constitution, the
Carta Caritatis
(Charter of Love) devised about 1117 by the second abbot of Citeaux, the Englishman Stephen Harding, decreed that all should follow the
Rule of St Benedict
as interpreted at Citeaux and provided for lasting affiliation between a mother house and the communities which it had originally colonized.
¹⁴
The propaganda was led by Bernard, who from 1115 until his death in 1153 was abbot of one of Citeaux’s earliest daughter-houses, Clairvaux, but who spent much of his time travelling across Europe as an adviser to popes and princes, popularizing the order and attracting huge numbers of benefactors and recruits. By 1152 – when the general chapter forbade any more new foundations without permission from the centre – there were over 300 houses in Europe, including almost 50 for monks and a further eight for nuns in England. The first English house, at Waverley (Surrey), was colonized in 1128 by monks from L’Aumône, a Cistercian abbey near Chartres, but more influential was to be the next foundation in 1132 at Rievaulx (Yorkshire), a daughter of Bernard’s own abbey of Clairvaux. Rievaulx would produce five daughters of its own, in Scotland and northern England, and through these a total of 11 ‘granddaughters’, with further ‘great-granddaughters’ to follow. The equally famous abbey at Fountains, some 30 kilometres or so south-west of Rievaulx, was established at about the same time.