Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages / Third Edition

by Edward Lewes Cutts

There is a passage in the correspondence of Coldingham Priory (published by the Surties Society, 1841, p. 52) which gives us a graphic sketch of the arrival of guests at a monastery:—“On St. Alban’s-day, June 17 [year not given—it was towards the end of Edward III.], two monks, with a company of certain secular persons, came riding into the gateway of the monastery about nine o’clock in the morning. This day happened to be Sunday, but they were hospitably and reverently received, had lodgings assigned them, a special mass service performed for them, and after a refection and washing their feet, it being supposed that they were about to pursue their journey to London the next morning, they were left at an early hour to take repose. While the bell was summoning the rest of the brotherhood to vespers, the monk who had been in attendance upon them (the hospitaller) having gone with the rest to sing his chant in the choir, the secular persons appear to have asked the two monks to take a walk with them to look at the Castle of Durham,” &c.[89]

There could hardly have been any place in the Middle Ages which could have presented such a constant succession of picturesque scenes as the Hospitium of a monastery. And what a contrast must often have existed between the Hospitium and the Cloister. Here a crowd of people of every degree—nobles and ladies, knights and dames, traders with their wares, minstrels with their songs and juggling tricks, monks and clerks, palmers, friars, beggars—bustling about the court or crowding the long tables of the hall; and, a few paces off, the dark-frocked monks, with faces buried in their cowls, pacing the ambulatory in silent meditation, or sitting at their meagre refection, enlivened only by the monotonous sound of the novice’s voice reading a homily from the pulpit!

Many of the remaining buildings of the monastery were arranged around this outer court. Ingulphus tells us that the second court of the Saxon monastery of Croyland (about 875 A.D.) had the gate on the north, and the almonry near it—a very usual position for it; the shops of the tailors and shoe-makers, the hall of the novices, and the abbot’s lodgings on the east; the guest-hall and its chambers on the south; and the stable-house, and granary, and bake-house on the west. The Gate-house was usually a large and handsome tower, with the porter’s lodge on one side of the arched entrance; and often a strong room on the other, which served as the prison of the manor-court of the convent; and often a handsome room over the entrance, in which the manorial court was held. In the middle of the court was often a stone cross, round which markets and fairs were often held.

In the “Vision of Piers Ploughman” an interesting description is given of a Dominican convent of the fourteenth century. We will not trouble the reader with the very archaic original, but will give him a paraphrase of it. The writer says that, on approaching, he was so bewildered by their magnitude and beauty, that for a long time he could distinguish nothing certainly but stately buildings of stone, pillars carved and painted, and great windows well wrought. In the quadrangle he notices the cross standing in the centre, surrounded with tabernacle-work: he enters the minster (church), and describes the arches carved and gilded, the wide windows full of shields of arms and merchants’ marks on stained glass, the high tombs under canopies, with armed effigies in alabaster, and lovely ladies lying by their sides in many gay garments. He passes into the cloister and sees it pillared and painted, and covered with lead and paved with tiles, and conduits of white metal pouring their water into latten (bronze) lavatories beautifully wrought. The chapter-house he says was wrought like a great church, carved and painted like a parliament-house. Then he went into the fratry, and found it a hall fit for a knight and his household, with broad boards (tables) and clean benches, and windows wrought as in a church. Then he wandered all about—

“And seigh halles ful heigh, and houses ful noble,
Chambres with chymneys, and chapeles gaye,
And kychenes for an high kynge in castels to holden,
And their dortoure ydight with dores ful stronge,
Fermerye, and fraitur, with fele more houses,
And all strong stone wall, sterne opon heithe,
With gay garites and grete, and ich whole yglazed,
And other houses ynowe to herberwe the queene.”

The churches of the friars differed from those of monks. They were frequently composed either of a nave only or a nave and two (often very narrow) aisles, without transepts, or chapels, or towers; they were adapted especially for preaching to large congregations—e.g. the Austin Friars’ Church in the City of London, lately restored; St. Andrew’s Hall, Norwich. In Viollet le Duc’s “Dictionary of Architecture” is given a bird’s-eye view of the monastery of the Augustine Friars of St. Marie des Vaux Verts, near Brussels, which is a complete example of one of these houses.[90]

Every monastery had a number of dependent establishments of greater or less size: cells on its distant estates; granges on its manors; chapels in places where the abbey tenants were at a distance from a church; and often hermitages under its protection. A ground-plan and view of one of these cells, the Priory of St. Jean-les-Bons-hommes, of the end of the twelfth century, still remaining in a tolerably perfect state, is given by Viollet le Duc (Dict Arch., i. 276, 277). It is a miniature monastery, with a little cloistered court, surrounded by the usual buildings: an oratory on the north side; on the east a sacristy, and chapter-house, and long range of buildings, with dormitory over; on the south side the refectory and kitchen; and another exterior court, with stables and offices. The preceptory of Hospitallers at Chibburn, Northumberland, which remains almost as the knights left it, is another example of these small rural houses. It is engraved in Turner’s “Domestic Architecture,” vol. ii. p. 197. It also consists of a small court, with a chapel about forty-five feet long, on the west side; and other buildings, which we cannot appropriate, on the remaining sides. Of the monastic cells we have already spoken in describing the office of prior. The one or two brethren who were placed in a cell to manage the distant estates of the monastery would probably be chosen rather for their qualities as prudent stewards than for their piety. The command of money which their office gave them, and their distance from the supervision of their ecclesiastical superiors, brought them under temptation, and it is probably in these cells, and among the brethren who superintended the granges, and the officials who could leave the monastery at pleasure on the plea of convent business, that we are to look for the irregularities of which the Middle-Age satirists speak. The monk among Chaucer’s “Canterbury Pilgrims” was prior of a cell, for we read that—

“When he rode, men might his bridel here
Gingeling in a whistling sound, as clere
And eke as loud as doth the chapelle belle,
Ther as this lord was keeper of the celle.”

The monk on whose intrigue “The Shipman’s Tale” is founded, was probably the cellarer of his convent:—

“This noble monk of which I you devise,
Had of his abbot, as him list, licence;
Because he was a man of high prudence,
And eke an officer, out for to ride
To seen his granges and his bernes wide.”