Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

Their great landed wealth made the bishops feudal barons, while bishoprics in their turn came to be regarded as offices at the disposal of the king; a bad king would parcel them out amongst his favourites or sell them to the highest bidders, heedless of their moral character. Thus crept into the Church the sin of ‘simony’ or ‘traffic in holy things’ so strongly condemned by the first Apostles, and, following hard on the heels of simony, the worldliness born of the temptations of wealth and power. The bishop who was numbered amongst a feudal baronage and entertained a lax nobility at his palace was little likely to be shocked at priests convicted of ignorance or immorality, or to spend his time in trying to reform their habits.

It was, then, not only in horror of the world, but in reproach of the Church herself that the monk turned to the idea of separation from man and communion with God. In the earliest days of monasticism each hermit followed his special theory of prayer and self-discipline; he would gather round him small communities of disciples, and these would remain or go away to form other communities as they chose, a lack of system that often resulted in unhealthy fanaticism or useless idleness.

St. Benedict

In the sixth century an Italian monk, Benedict of Nursia (480–543), compiled a set of regulations for his followers, which, under the name of ‘the rule of Benedict’, became the standard Code of monastic life for all Western Christendom. Benedict demanded of his monks a ‘novitiate’ of twelve months during which they could test their call to a life of continual sacrifice. At the end of this time, if the novice still continued resolute in his intention and was approved by the monastic authorities, he was accepted into the brotherhood by taking the perpetual vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity, the three conditions of life most hostile to the lust of possession, turbulence, and sensuality that dominated the Middle Ages. To these vows were added the obligation of manual labour—seven hours work a day in addition to the recitation of prayers enjoined on the community.

The faithful Benedictine at least could never be accused of idleness, and to the civilizing influence of the ‘regulars’, as the monks were called because they obeyed a rule (regula), in contrast to the ‘secular’ priests who lived in the world, Europe owed an immense debt of gratitude.

Sometimes it is said contemptuously that the monks of the Middle Ages chose beautiful sites on which to found luxurious homes. Certainly they selected as a rule the neighbourhood of rivers and lakes, water being a prime necessity of life, and in such neighbourhoods raised chapels and monasteries that have become the architectural wonder of the world. Yet many of these wonders began in a circle of wooden huts built on a reclaimed marsh, and it was the labour of the followers of St. Benedict that replaced wood by stone and swamps by gardens and farms.

Where the barbarian or feudal anarchist burned and destroyed, the monk of the Middle Ages brought back the barren soil to pasturage or tillage; and just as he weeded, sowed, and planted as part of his obligation to God, so from the produce of his labours he provided for the destitute at his gate, or in his cloister schools supplied the ignorant with the rudiments of knowledge and culture. The monasteries were centres of mediaeval life, not, like the castles, of death. In his quiet cell the monk chronicler became an historian; the copyist reproduced with careful affection decaying manuscripts; the illuminator made careful pictures of his day; the chemist concocted strange healing medicines, or in his crucibles developed wondrous colours.

‘Good is it for us to dwell here, where man lives more purely, falls more rarely, rises more quickly, treads more cautiously, rests more securely, is absolved more easily, and rewarded more plenteously.’ This is the saying of St. Bernard, one of the later monastic reformers; and his ideal was the general conception of the best life possible as understood in the Middle Ages. To the monasteries flocked the devout seeking a home of prayer; but also the student or artist unable to follow his bent in the turbulent world, and the man who despised or feared the atmosphere of war. Even the feudal baron would pause in his quarrels to make some pious gift to abbey or priory, a tribute to a faith he admired but was too weak to practise. Sometimes he came in later life, a penitent who, toiling like his serf, sought in the cloister the salvation of his soul. ‘In the monasteries,’ says a mediaeval German, ‘one saw Counts cooking in the kitchen and Margraves leading their pigs out to feed.’

Monasticism, with its belief in brotherhood, was a leveller of class distinctions; but, like the rest of the Church, it found in the popular enthusiasm it aroused the path of temptation. Men, we have seen, entered the cloister for other reasons than pure devotion to God; and the rule of Benedict proving too strict they yielded secretly to sins that perhaps were not checked or reproved because abbots in time ceased to be saints and became, like the bishops, feudal landlords with worldly interests. In this way vice and laziness were allowed to spread and cling like bindweed.

Throughout the Middle Ages there were times of corruption and failure amongst the monastic Orders, followed by waves of sweeping reform and earnest endeavour, when once again the Cross was raised as an emblem of sacrifice and drew the more spiritual of men unto it.