Fountains Abbey: The story of a mediæval monastery

by George Hodges

In the west walk, against the cellarium wall, sat the novices, busy with their books, studying church music and grammar and theology. Apt students, when they became monks, were sometimes sent to complete their education at Oxford, where they lived in the Cistercian Abbey of Bewley (founded in 1280), or in the Cistercian College of St. Bernard, now St. John’s (founded in 1432). There they learned to preach, and teach some simple theology to the novices who succeeded them. There they learned also to interpret and apply the canon law: they became the lawyers of the monastery.

It is likely that Fountains, like other great houses, maintained a grammar school for the sons of the neighbours. The master of such a school would not be a monk but a secular person, employed by the Abbey but not a member of the family. The school-house has not been identified. The building which once stood across the river at the south end of the cellarium would have been conveniently placed for this purpose. A glimpse of the discipline of such a school is had in the fact that, in the sixteenth century, a schoolmaster, receiving his degree of bachelor of arts, was presented with a birch as a symbol of his office, and was required forthwith, in the presence of his examiners, to flog a boy hired for that exercise.

Over the roof of the east walk, a line of windows opened out of the dormitory. This was a long room, with two rows of beds from end to end, like a ward in a hospital. The beds were provided with sheets of linsey-woolsey, and the monks lay on straw which was emptied out of its blue ticking and renewed once every year. At Durham, the custom was to carry his blue bed to the brother’s funeral, and hold it as a canopy over the grave during the service; so that every night when he lay down to rest he was profitably reminded of his last sleep. The monks laid aside their scapulars, but slept in their woollen cassocks, so that they woke ready dressed. The day stairs to the dormitory are in the south-east corner of the cloister. There was a room at the head of the stairs, extending south to the end of the dormitory, which may have corresponded to the master’s chamber in a like position in a school. Here the prior may have slept with an attentive ear for any breach of order. It is uncertain whether there were partitions between the beds, or whether the brethren were denied even such scanty privacy as that. It is plain that they had no “cells.” The building which opened at right angles with the dormitory beside the river was the toilet room, the necessarium. Through its hall communication was had with the abbot’s lodgings. The abbot, according to rule, must sleep in the common dormitory. He probably gave this regulation a liberal interpretation, as the house grew great, and considered that this hall made his room “constructively” a part of the chamber of the monks.

At two o’clock in the morning a great bell rang in the tower, and a little bell in the dormitory answered it. Then every brother bestirred himself. He threw a cloak about him, thrust his feet into his shoes, and descended the night stairs at the end of the room into the dark church.

The night service, called matins, consisted of a reading of many lessons and a chanting of many psalms, and was performed to the accompaniment of the organ. A light burned before the high altar, and there was a light in the loft at the organ, and another for the reader at the lecturn, perhaps still another at the chant-book of the precentor. But otherwise the great church was in darkness. The psalms were sung from memory. Now and then some one went about among the singing brothers to make sure that no man slept. This lasted for an hour or more.

After this service, the monks came out into the north walk of the cloister, where cressets flamed uncertainly against the walls, and there continued until dawn, reading or meditating, but having their hoods well pulled back from their faces to make it evident that they were wide awake. This study-hour was, of course, short in summer, but long in winter. When the weather was very bad, they sought refuge in the chapter-house. In some cloisters there was glass in the open stone-work of the porch; but, at best, this was a cold place of an early morning. The dormitory was cold, the church was cold, and the cloister was as cold as the sky; but they were used to it, like all their neighbours.

This north walk was the living-room and study of the monastery. The books in most frequent use were kept in a case which stood in a shallow recess still to be seen in the transept wall. Others were stored in two capacious closets on either side of the chapter-house door. Every year, at the beginning of Lent, all the books of the monastery were spread out on a carpet on the floor of the chapter-house, and a general accounting was had. A roll was called of brothers and of books. Each monk rose at the sound of his name, produced the book which had been assigned to him the year before, and returned it, humbly confessing if he had not read it through. Then the books were newly distributed and charged. At Ripley Castle, bound in an octavo volume, are several of the Fountains books: a Latin grammar, some sermons and some music, and a paraphrase of Ovid, in which that irresponsible writer is made to serve as a mediæval moralist. There is also a fragment of a book on medecine, to which they might profitably have added, as at Meaux Abbey, a book on eating,—De Edendo. No catalogue remains, but we can guess at the titles from the lists of other mediæval libraries. There were writings of the fathers, ancient and modern, with a pretty full set of the works of St. Bernard; and several commentaries on the Bible; and a good deal of biography, mostly ecclesiastical; and books on law and ritual.

So the brethren sat in the cold cloister reading their good books. The Benedictines, who were scholars and literary persons, provided by rule that these precious manuscript volumes should be handled with becoming care. “When the religious are engaged in reading in cloister or church, they shall if possible hold the books in their left hands, wrapped in the sleeve of their tunics, and resting on their knees.”

Who were these men? Whence had they come? and why?

As for their origin, they belonged, so far as we can now discover, to the same class from which the ministry is still mainly recruited: to the great company of those who are neither rich nor poor, who neither earn their living by their hands nor inherit the means of living from their fathers, represented in mediæval England by the gentry, as distinguished on the one side from the peasantry, and on the other side from the aristocracy.