English monasteries

by J. Charles Cox

Saving for the very few that were directly founded by kings or queens, every monastic house in England, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, was founded by men of large landed property, and, after the Conquest, by those of feudal power. It was in this way, from the very necessity of the case, that the religious houses obtained the endowments of land or tithe that were essential for their support. Not only did such as these found the monasteries, but they largely helped to fill them. There is not a single old feudal family known in English history but several of its members can be proved to have entered the ranks of the religious. Nor were such as these only drawn from the cadets of families of position or substance. Those who have tried to study the earlier history of the county families of any of our English shires will be quite familiar with cases in which the ordinary succession of primogeniture in manorial or landed descent is interrupted, because the eldest son had taken monastic vows.

The idea current among certain superficial writers, that there was a perpetual warfare between the monastic and feudal system, cannot be maintained by true historical students either in Christendom at large or in England in particular. It is too often forgotten that the monasteries were very largely recruited from those who were themselves members of the feudal aristocracy. Particularly was this the case in the eleventh century, when the influence of Hugh the Abbot of Cluny, who was himself of high feudal birth, was so great. Lists or isolated names of the members of the priories or cells of Cluniac foundation in our own country of this period prove that these monks who settled on our shores were, many of them, members of the French aristocracy.

Though it was the glory of the English Church in the most stringent times of feudal tyranny to call to Holy Orders those who were specially freed from among her own villeins for the purpose, and though many of the lowliest birth attained to, then as now, high and responsible position in the hierarchy, the other side of the shield must not be forgotten. Columns might readily be filled with the names of those in England who were members of good families, and did distinguished service for the Church, though trained in cloistered seclusion. It may suffice here to mention two or three of considerable mark in early days. Winfrid of Crediton, who, after years of careful seclusion in the Hampshire monastery of Nursling, became the renowned apostle of Germany, under the title of Boniface, was the eldest child of wealthy and noble parents. Biscop, who at the age of twenty-five gave himself up to the monastic life, and became the celebrated abbot of the North of England, so well known as St. Benedict Biscop, was of good birth and position, and the owner of a considerable estate. “He despised,” says Bede, “a temporal wealth that he might obtain that which is eternal; he refused to be the father of mortal children, being fore-ordained of Christ to educate for Him in spiritual doctrine immortal children in Heaven.” St. Alphege, the saintly Archbishop martyred by the Danes in 1011, was born to high position and wealth, the only son of a family of distinction; but he forsook all in favour of a Benedictine monastery.

When the time of the Conquest is passed, the evidence of those of high birth seeking the cloister is fully maintained. The first two Archbishops of Canterbury who ruled in the earlier Norman days, Lanfranc and Anselm, men of great wealth and culture, the one of senatorial rank and the other of noble origin, made considerable temporal sacrifices to follow the Benedictine rule. Or once again, the founder of the remarkable Order of the Gilbertines—who did so good and pure a work right up to their dissolution, the only Order founded by an Englishman—was Gilbert of Sempringham, the eldest son of a wealthy Norman knight, who sacrificed his considerable estates to further his conception of the monastic ideal. Now all these men, and many others almost equally distinguished, entered the religious life without any idea of afterwards emerging from the cloister and attaining to high spiritual rule or administration; they were but examples of hundreds of others of equal birth and self-sacrifice, who served God as faithfully in their limited circles, though their acts remain unwritten on the annals of mere human records.

Equally is all this true of the other sex. Re-Christianised England of the pre-Norman days stands out in bold relief from the rest of Christendom for the readiness, nay, the eagerness, with which gentle ladies of royal blood and the proudest estate adopted the monastic life, discarding all outward pomp and circumstance. Rapin, the French historian, sneered at the number of royal saints produced by Saxon England, who knew, as he thought, no suffering; but a much greater Frenchman, the academician Montalembert, has amply justified their memory in a chapter of singular beauty of language blended with careful historical research. Nothing but the fact that the grace of God led these Saxon ladies of high degree to see the beauty of the sacred life can account for the way in which, throughout the seventh and early part of the eighth century, they gave up worldly ease for cloistered stillness. It was the same in nearly all the petty principalities—in Kent there were the saints, Eadburg of Lyminge, Eanswith, Sexberga, and Mildred; in East Anglia, Etheldreda, Wendreda, and Wimburga; in Mercia, Kyneburga, Kyneswith, Pega, Werburga, and Millburga; among the East Saxons, Ethelburga of Barking and Osyth; in Wessex, Frideswide, Everilda, Sidwell and Cuthburga; and in Northumbria, Ebba and Hilda. In the tenth century, also, there were the Saints Eadburga of Pershore, Edith of Polesworth, Edith of Wilton, and Wilfrida.

Judged from the mere human standpoint, or even from the common-place platform of average modern Christianity, conduct of this kind seems mere foolishness; and worldlings have, forsooth, to imagine that all such had been crossed in love, and soured with disappointment, or were merely filled with a narrow-minded and tearful anxiety to save their own souls. But, after all, the example set by these Christian Saxon ladies has never died out, and never will, so long as the love of the heavenly Bridegroom endures. England from the seventh century downwards has never lacked delicately nurtured ladies, ready to forego worldly distinction, domestic ease, or intellectual ambition, in favour of a heart-whole sacrifice to the religious life. When Henry VIII. crushed out the nunneries in England, a large number of the Sisters belonged to the best of the nation’s blood; and ladies of the noble and high-born families who clung to the unreformed faith at once established and maintained English nunneries across the seas in Belgium or in France. With the blessed revival of Catholic life within the English Church, in the middle of the last century, there came about a re-establishment of vowed Sisterhood life, which has of late made a wondrous growth. Those best qualified to judge know well how these English sisterhoods and nunneries have been guided and endowed by those of the gentlest blood, whose names in religion hide those by which the world might have recognised them. And what was true of their origin is true of their present-day life; wealth, position, comfort, and intellect are still placed by many of these Sisters at the feet of Christ.

There was naturally great anxiety on the part of monasteries to do their best with the lands bestowed on them, and the monks and religious canons became almost proverbially the best farmers. Nor was the land cleared, the cattle tended, the sheep pastured, and the wood thinned simply with the idea of producing a good revenue to support themselves, to maintain their church and buildings, and, above all, to minister to the poor and needy; for it was keenly felt that there must be work for the hands as well as the head, and that in doing their very best in manual toil, as well as in worship in quire, they were giving glory to the Creator. “Idleness,” says St. Benedict in his rule, “is the enemy of the soul; therefore let the brothers devote certain hours to work with their hands, and at other times occupy themselves in sacred reading.” Then the great founder of the religious rule proceeded to lay down the hours, according to the seasons, during which such work was to be performed. Nor were his brethren, as he plainly told them, whatever had been their position, to be disconcerted if the necessity arose for getting in the harvest or doing agricultural labours with their own hands. The way in which the monks of England triumphed over nature, drained the swamps, and brought barren tracts of land into cultivation, was beyond all praise; thus they found abundant employment for their tenants and neighbours as well as for themselves, and materially increased the food supplies for the country at large. Visitors to the sites of ruined abbeys, such as the Yorkshire houses of Fountains, Riveaulx, or Byland, are apt hastily to praise the cunning of the monks in obtaining settlements in such pleasant and well-cultivated sites, forgetful that it was these very monks who turned comparatively barren and desolate lands into pasture, plantation, and tillage. The marvellous drainage works accomplished in the Holderness by the Cistercian monks of Meaux Abbey, or by the Gilbertine Canons of Watton Priory, whereby hundreds of acres were rendered capable of tillage, bear their fruits to the present day. It is difficult now to estimate the drudgery, toil, and skill required in days comparatively destitute of mechanical appliances to produce such results.

Perhaps the one spot in all England more than another that would cure the man who talks flippantly of the lazy, indulgent life of our mediæval monks in their comfortable quarters is the rarely-visited site of the once great mitred Benedictine Abbey of St. Benet of Holme, amid the Norfolk Broads. To visit such a place, particularly in wet or lowering weather, with the waters swirling round the still well-defined precincts, the wide dykes filled to the brim, the land oozing with moisture over hundreds of acres all round—and then to picture the courage necessary to enable scores of men to give their lives and pass their days in a continuous round of worship and of battling with the elements in such a desolate spot as this—cannot fail to shatter any honest man’s belief in the ease-seeking nature of an English Benedictine of mediæval days. Such a man, after visiting St. Benet’s, Holme, might say, “What a fool,” but he could no longer sneer at the monk as a poor, lazy beggar.

More particularly, too, would this be the case did he know some of the stories, as yet unknown to print, of the monks of this swamp. How, for instance, on one occasion (in the winter of 1287-8) the waters overflowed the lands and outbuildings to such an extent that only the church, on the highest ground, was unflooded; and how, within the nave, after much anxious thought, it was considered true charity to stable the horses to save them from drowning. Or if perchance the thought should arise that these monks were sustained by good fare against the damp and chills of their surroundings, the truth as to their usual meagre dietary, with exact details, can be learnt from various obedientiary rolls that are still preserved among the stores of the Bodleian. But more anon as to monastic fare.

We are accustomed to acknowledge that literature was sustained in the cloister, and to recognise the beauty of the illuminated missals therein written and painted with such consummate skill; but that the monastery, particularly the Cistercian House, was the centre of so many crafts is often unknown or forgotten. Within the large precincts of such a house would be not only the various storehouses, but the workshops of the smith, the carpenter, the mason, the shoemaker, the weaver, the candlemaker, and the winepress. Everything that could be required for the church and house and its inmates was, if possible, made on the premises. If anyone is desirous of understanding, by ocular proof, to what use many of the outbuildings still standing around the grand ruins of Fountains, Kirkstall, or Furness were put, he cannot do better than visit the old Cistercian abbey of Maulbraun, in Würtemberg, within easy reach by train of Heidelberg; for he will there find nearly the whole of the necessary mediæval buildings of the community still standing, and in fairly good condition. It was, doubtless, the frequent communication of the English Cistercian monks with their fellows on the Continent that moved them successfully to attempt and carry on such forms of culture as vine-growing, that seem ill-adapted to our climate and have long since been abandoned. But that vines were grown and wine made at Beaulieu, and various other monastic centres in England is beyond a doubt.