FOR NEARLY A THOUSAND YEARS, religiously devout men and women in medieval Britain joined monasteries in the hope that, if they separated themselves from others and followed the words of Jesus in the Bible – ‘Everyone that hath forsaken houses, or brethren or lands for my name’s sake’ – they would find ‘everlasting life’.
This book explores the purpose of those monasteries and describes the daily life of monks and nuns. It explains the differences between the four Monastic Orders (Benedictine, Cluniac, Carthusian and Cistercian), and outlines how monasteries were designed and managed. Separate chapters focus on nunneries and the various quasi-monastic orders. The book concludes with an account of the Dissolution of the Monasteries and a gazetteer where medieval abbeys and priories can be visited today.
The first monks were third-century Christian hermits in North Africa who sought a contemplative life in desert caves or mud huts until they began to form small communities (monasteries) for mutual protection and support. In Britain the earliest recorded of these monastery-type settlements date from the fifth century at Tintagel (Cornwall), Wales as early as AD 500 and Scotland in AD 563 when monks from Ireland colonised Iona, a small island off the west coast in the Inner Hebrides.
The left lobe of this mid-thirteenth-century quatrefoil at Croyland Abbey (Benedictine: formerly Lincolnshire, now Cambridgeshire) shows the figure of St Guthlac with the Anglo-Saxon prince who endowed the Abbey.
The arrival of Italian priests in England on a papal mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity and their subsequent founding of a monastery church at Canterbury (Kent) around AD 597 redirected those efforts and laid the foundations for the great abbeys of medieval Britain.
Enriched by lavish donations from pious kings and landowners, by the sixteenth century their successors had amassed huge estates and owned around twenty-five per cent of England and Wales.
Fifteenth-century tomb effigy of King Athelstan (d. AD 939), who endowed Malmesbury Abbey (Benedictine: Wiltshire).
While their spiritual motivations may have been similar, the lives of monks towards the end of the Middle Ages were considerably more comfortable than those of their predecessors who had entered monasteries three hundred years earlier. Paradoxically, such wealth also made them dangerously vulnerable when the clamour of the protestant Reformation merged with the avarice of Henry VIII (reigned 1509–47). The upshot was a wave of upheaval and change that saw all but one of the kingdom’s monasteries dissolved in 1540 – their buildings sold, their inhabitants evicted, their buildings reduced to what William Shakespeare (1564–1616) called ‘bare ruined choirs’.
Byland Abbey ruins (Cistercian: Yorkshire), built in the thirteenth century. Note the remains of the mosaic tile pavement.
Detail of a Benedictine monk on the tomb of Bishop William Wykeham (d. 1404), Winchester Cathedral Priory (Benedictine: Hampshire).