The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (31 page)

Figure 27: Cockersand Abbey (Lancashire)
. This bleak windswept site, originally used for a hermitage, gives an impression of the secluded environment favoured by the Premonstratensians: the abbey stood on a sandstone outcrop beside the Lune estuary, with poorly drained mosses on the landward side. The cloisters lay between the surviving chapter house and the shoreline.

All religious communities professed to be engaged in a fight against the Devil – normally through prayer – but a distinctive expression of this was provided by the military orders. The best-known, the Templars and the Hospitallers, both arose in the aftermath of the First Crusade of the 1090s. While their bases in Syria and Palestine were fortified for military action – providing a religious vocation for knights more suited to fighting than to prayer – their houses across Europe were used primarily for the administration of estates, for hospitality to pilgrims going to or from the Holy Land, as recruitment and training centres, and as retirement homes for aged members of the orders. The first Templar foundation in England was in London in 1128, the first for the Hospitallers at Clerkenwell (Middlesex) about 1144. The Templars were eventually suppressed by the papacy in 1312, following accusations of heresy and scandalous behaviour, much of their property passing to the Hospitallers, who had 55 houses in England at their peak on the eve of the Black Death. Archaeological investigation of sites associated with the military orders show that, while their houses had churches and a variety of domestic and agricultural buildings, they did not normally follow the standard monastic plan. At Denny (Cambridgeshire), for example, where the Templars took over a small Benedictine priory about 1170, the refectory and dormitory were not arranged around cloisters in conventional fashion, although such cloisters were eventually built after the house had become a Franciscan nunnery in the early fourteenth century.
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Nunneries have tended to receive less attention in studies of medieval monasticism as a whole, largely because their communities were fewer in number, generally smaller in size, and lacking most of the variety which characterized the male religious life. By the middle of the twelfth century the 13 houses of 1066 had risen to about 70, mostly Benedictine, Cistercian or Augustinian in their affiliation.
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However, the allegiance scarcely matters, since the lifestyle varied little and none were admitted to a share in the government of the order: Cistercian abbesses, for example, did not attend the annual general chapter. In the medieval period, all nuns were supposed to lead an enclosed life, ‘withdrawn from the world’ to spend their time in prayer: the nun as nurse or teacher is largely a product of the sixteenth-century ‘Counter-Reformation’. Although in Scotland and Wales there were a number of royal and aristocratic foundations of nunneries during the course of the twelfth century, in England the founders were normally drawn from the ranks of the gentry, with endowments correspondingly modest. This in turn means that the surviving buildings of medieval nunneries tend to be small-scale and fragmentary. Particularly regrettable is the lack of any evidence above ground of buildings associated with the Orders of Fontevrault and Sempringham – the latter also known as the Gilbertines and an order confined to England, indeed the only one to originate here. Both developed during the twelfth century, their distinctive feature being the provision of separate church and cloister complexes for the nuns on the one hand and the canons who led their worship on the other; in other orders, nunneries usually employed chaplains among their male servants. This double-cloister arrangement can still be seen at Fontevrault itself, where Henry II and his family lie buried, but in England it is known only from archaeological investigation: excavations at the Gilbertine sites at Sempringham itself (in Lincolnshire) and Watton (Yorkshire) have shown the nuns’ church to be divided lengthways down the middle, so nuns and canons could access it from their separate cloisters without seeing each other, while aerial photography suggests a similar arrangement at another priory of this order, Shouldham (Norfolk).
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Nor is there any obvious trace of the nunnery founded in 1415 by Henry V at Syon (in Isleworth on the north bank of the River Thames), the only house in England of the strict
contemplative Bridgettine Order. This was replaced by the Elizabethan and Georgian mansion on the site still known as Syon House, although the community stayed together in exile after the dissolution and – from its current base at South Brent (Devon) – can claim a continuous history ever since.

Nevertheless, a few medieval nunneries have left good surviving remains. The church of the Benedictine house at Romsey (Hampshire), a pre-Conquest foundation, continues because in 1545 it was purchased by the town as its parish church; the nave, transepts and east end here are fine examples of Norman Romanesque work, the product of major rebuilding from the 1120s onwards.
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The Benedictine nunnery in Cambridge, originally founded early in Stephen’s reign but subsequently endowed about 1160 by Malcolm IV King of Scotland and Earl of Huntingdon, who was responsible for the dedication to the Poitevin saint, Radegund, also survives in part because several of its buildings, including the cloisters, church and refectory, were incorporated in modified form within Jesus College, Cambridge, founded at its dissolution in 1496 by the Bishop of Ely. The church here, though only partially remaining as the College chapel, is more modestly proportioned, with a squat central tower and short narrow chancel. Brewood White Ladies Priory (Shropshire), an Augustinian nunnery founded probably in the late twelfth century, is also represented today by the remains of its church, but this was mean in size and never had a central tower built over the crossing.

Whatever the affiliation, every house of monks, canons or nuns in medieval England held estates which sustained it, and no study of monasticism should neglect the impact on the landscape beyond the precinct walls. The Cistercians have attracted a good deal of attention in this respect because they established granges to house lay brothers working the estates away from the vicinity of the house itself. Many of these granges controlled extensive tracts of scarcely populated land, allowing the Cistercians by the last quarter of the twelfth century to become famed for their vast sheep flocks which supplied the wool export trade to Italy and the Low Countries; in 1193, the English houses collectively contributed one year’s wool crop to King Richard I’s ransom. Typically, a grange comprised a chapel, dormitory, barns and dovecote – the latter a reminder (along with monastic fishponds) of the prohibition in the
Rule of St Benedict
on eating four-footed creatures, and hence the importance within the monastic diet of those with two feet or none. First mentioned in England in 1145, a total of 75 such granges are known to have been established in Yorkshire alone by 1200, no less than 24 of which were associated with Fountains; among surviving remains of these Fountains granges are a gatehouse at Kilnsey on the River Wharfe, a chapel at Bouthwaite on the River Nidd, and a barn at Sutton above the River Ouse.
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But the Cistercians were not of course alone in exercising direct control of extensive tracts of land. The Benedictine nuns of Minchinhampton
(Gloucestershire) had a flock of 2,000 sheep before the first ‘White Monks’ set foot in England and while this was dwarfed by the 15,000 sheep being kept by Fountains in 1286, Benedictine Peterborough and Crowland had even greater numbers (at least 16,000 each) around 1320. Nor was reliance on granges peculiar to the Cistercians, for wherever a community kept land for its own farming purposes – as opposed to leasing it to tenants – this was a sensible arrangement as a base where hired labourers could live and work. For example, a Benedictine grange at Cumnor (Oxfordshire), part of Abingdon Abbey’s estate, has been subject to archaeological investigation and the reeve’s house, the farmworkers’ cottages, barns, a cowshed, dovecote and fishponds have all been identified. Nor should we envisage every grange as exclusively agricultural in purpose: the Fountains grange at Bradley near the confluence of the Rivers Calder and Colne, for example, oversaw a metalworking site at Smytheclough, functioning by 1194, where a dam, watercourses and slagheaps have all been identified. Whatever the enterprise – farming, quarrying, mining, metalworking – religious foundations brought long-term stability to estate management. Unlike lay families’ estates, they did not break up as a result of royal displeasure or the failure of heirs. So planning could be long-term and investment could be made with confidence for what seemed an infinite future.
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The fruits of all this can still be seen in the profusion of monastic buildings which date to the expansionist era of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries: the era when recruitment was buoyant, new land was being won for cultivation, and an increasing population fuelled rising incomes whether through the sale of agricultural produce or the granting of leases to lengthening queues of aspiring tenants. The correlation between trends in the rise and fall of population and the initiation of cathedral and abbey building works during the course of the middle ages is striking.
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These buildings – often additions to or replacements for Norman Romanesque structures of the previous century – were in the styles conventionally known as Early English and Decorated, characterized by pointed arches and arcading, fluted columns and (in contrast to the Romanesque apse) straight-sided east ends to their churches; but where the Early English style is recognized by its tall narrow lancet windows, the Decorated boasts much broader windows, with elaborate tracery, and intricate sculptural detail. Among present-day cathedrals which served as medieval monasteries, the east end at Southwark, rebuilt following a fire in the church in 1207, the west front of the church at Peterborough, completed by 1238 as a façade to the Romanesque nave behind, the chapter house at Chester, finished by 1250, and the east end at Ely, which replaced a much smaller Romanesque apse and was ready by 1252, are among the finest examples of the Early English style. The octagonal central tower at Ely, successor to the Norman tower which collapsed in 1322,
and the Lady Chapel here, completed in the 1370s and almost detached in a corner of the north transept, can scarcely be surpassed as an illustration of the Decorated. Elsewhere, the church of Westminster Abbey harmonizes aspects of both the Early English and the Decorated styles, and does so with remarkable uniformity for most of its length despite a 100-year break in construction after the death of King Henry III in 1272. This is because the western parts of the nave, built in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, deliberately – but unusually – followed what by then was the ‘outdated’ style already established in the rest of the building.
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Nor was grandiose building confined to the monastic church: the magnificent octagonal chapter house at Westminster Abbey, for example, built in the 1250s, bore an inscription comparing it to a rose among flowers and was described by the community’s historian Matthew Paris as ‘incomparable’, though admittedly this was paid for by Henry III as a setting fit for a king to address his subjects.
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Capitalist enterprise and elaborate building schemes inevitably provoked further reaction, and it came in the first half of the thirteenth century, when the papacy began to recognize new orders of friars. There was a fine line to be drawn between various radical groups which arose in western Europe about this time, all claiming to imitate the lives of Christ and his disciples as itinerant preachers who begged for their sustenance, and both the Humiliati of Provence and Lombardy and the Waldensians (or Poor Men of Lyons) of southern France were initially condemned as heretics in 1184. It was to the credit of Pope Innocent III that in 1210 he was prepared to approve a simple rule drawn up for another such group, the Poor Men of Assisi, because he appreciated their effectiveness in combating heresy: in effect, they could reach the parts the Church usually did not reach, by going onto the streets and into private houses. This was the origins of the Franciscan Order of Friars, named from their founder Francis of Assisi, a drop-out from his father’s prosperous cloth business. In their turn, the Franciscans inspired other friars’ orders, most notably the Dominican, Carmelite and Augustinian (‘Austin’) Friars, for whom rules were approved by the pope in 1216 and during the 1230s and 1250s respectively. The Dominicans arose from a team of canons preaching against the Cathar heresy in southern France and the order continued to stress the importance of preaching, and of academic study to underpin it, thereafter. The others represented attempts by the papacy to impose some discipline upon disparate individuals and small congregations who were living outside any formal ecclesiastical control. But whatever their origins, and any subtleties of emphasis which divided them, all were distinguished from other male religious orders by their less constrained lifestyles and their stress upon corporate as well as personal poverty: they were supposed not to depend upon the estates accumulated by their houses but to rely instead on alms given in return for their ministry to the laity, as preachers
in streets and confessors in homes. In practice, this meant that there was considerable freedom for the individual friar in how and where he spent his time, liberated from much of the daily routine of worship which characterized traditional communities: a liberation which led in turn to permission for many to become students and teachers at Europe’s universities, among them Paris, Oxford, Cambridge and Bologna, during the first half of the thirteenth century. By contrast, the small number of nuns who affiliated to these orders – by the dissolution there were only one Dominican and three Franciscan nunneries in the country – led enclosed lives similar to those of their sisters in the traditional orders.