Our English Towns and Villages

by H. R. Wilton Hall

3. So we find, as the Normans received lands here in England, and founded religious houses, most of them were connected with the monasteries across the sea, and were ruled by abbots who lived across the sea. Such branch houses were generally called priories, and the kings and barons who founded them gave them manors and parts of manors, sometimes taking them from the older Saxon monasteries and cathedrals. [6]

4. Then, too, there were the old Saxon houses, like St. Alban's Abbey, Westminster Abbey, and Glastonbury Abbey: they were reformed and improved, and to them, too, lands were given in various parts of the country, often far away from the mother house. Thus St. Alban's Monastery had important lands in the neighbourhood of the River Tyne, and a daughter house was opened there called Tynemouth Priory. So, you see, there were two kinds of priories in England: one class attached to English religious houses, and the other to Norman or foreign religious houses. In time the foreign priories received the name of alien priories.

5. All these religious houses had some interest in the land, and all of them, to a greater or less degree, were landlords. In some cases the lands given to them were manors which had been managed and tilled in the same way for hundreds of years. The only change was that the lord of the manor might be a society or religious house instead of a baron. Each of the manors had its steward, its villeins, and so forth, like any other in the land. But a good deal of the land given to these new religious houses had never been occupied before.

6. Though some of the monasteries, like St. Alban's and St. Edmund's Bury, were in towns, there were others, especially those founded in these Norman times, far away from towns, in pathless woods or deep dales, like Rievaulx, in Yorkshire. Others, like Ramsey and Thorney, were in lonely fens and marshes. Here the monks themselves set to work, as in the earlier days, and tilled the ground, keeping up their regular services in their little church most carefully—praying and working. Gradually their lands improved; other lands came to them; more labour was needed; and so, little by little, tenants took holdings on their lands, and farmed them for the "house", on much the same conditions as in the older manors.

7. We find that in many of the monasteries attention was given to other occupations besides agriculture. Some, especially those in towns, like St. Alban's, became in this period great seats of learning. All of them wrote the books they used, and some of them were particularly famed for their writing and illuminating. In fact, they were the book-producers of the age, and very little of the work of learned ancient scholars could have come down to us had it not been for the careful, painstaking work of simple monks quite unknown to history.

8. Some of the abbeys in the west of England, like Bath Abbey, had a good deal to do with opening up the wool trade, which in the Middle Ages became the staple trade of the south and west of England. Flaxley Abbey, in Gloucestershire, developed iron-smelting.

9. In the monasteries men could quietly think and work, and use the talents they had, without being called away to fight or do the unskilled work of the world. In these early times there were no other places where men could lead quiet, thoughtful lives, and "think things out", and then put them into practice. The men in the monasteries were not all equally good or religious or clever, but the work done in and through these old institutions was most important and most valuable to the country.

Summary.—Many new religious houses were founded [7] in Norman times. The Norman barons were more interested in establishing branch houses of Norman monasteries than in those they found [8] in England. Branch houses of the various monasteries were called priories, and those which belonged to foreign monasteries were called alien priories.

All the monasteries were landholders. Some of them took over old manors, others had uncultivated land given to them which in time became manors.

Some monasteries, like St. Alban's, Westminster, and Glastonbury, became great centres of learning. Others, in out-of-the-way places, encouraged various trades—Bath did much for the wool trade of the west of England; Flaxley developed iron-smelting.