BEFORE THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY there were several ways in which people could become a monk. While some joined as adults, others had little choice: having been raised in monasteries since childhood after their parents had made an offering or ‘oblation’ of them to the abbot. At Winchester Cathedral Priory (Benedictine: Hampshire), for example, thirty-five of forty-one new recruits who joined the monastery between the mid-1030s and 1072 were boys (pueri). Once enrolled it was almost impossible for them to leave – where would they go; what other life did they know? Elsewhere in Europe many influential figures in Benedictine monasticism were former oblates. They included Abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), oblated at the age of eight, and Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis (1081–1151), oblated at ten; the latter now best known for his patronage of gothic architecture at the famous royal abbey of Saint-Denis, north of Paris.
A boy oblate being received into a monastery, from a fourteenth-century Decretum (Book of Canon or Church law).
Around 1200, however, this system had largely disappeared from English male monasteries. The main reasons seem to have been a switch in aristocratic interests from monasteries to churches and assorted misgivings about the role of children in solemn places.
For adults the different Orders imposed different entry conditions. The first was age. The Cistercians insisted on a minimum age of sixteen, Benedictines about the same and the Carthusians twenty-one. Some monks joined monasteries when they were much older. At Byland Abbey (Cistercian: Yorkshire), for example, one of the thirteenth-century monks was a former bishop, pirate and adventurer who seemed to enjoy nothing more than regaling his fellow brethren with accounts of ‘his most audacious acts as well as his merited misfortunes’. Others were priests.
Social class was important. Although in theory there were no distinctions between nobles or paupers, in practice St Benedict understood the value of attracting recruits from the social and political elites and the benefits that their money and influence brought. When wealthy patrons endowed monasteries they often reserved the rights to nominate candidates and to appoint family members or allies to key posts. Even when these ties slackened, admission was restricted. From the fourteenth century until the Dissolution male monasteries required a fixed fee of £5 from novices for the cost of their clothing (habit); a sum beyond the resources of poorer people. As life as a monk demanded fluency in Latin, either learned before admission or acquired in a monastic school, such requirements again excluded most of the population, irrespective of their religious inclinations. In the late Middle Ages some prestigious monasteries even demanded references from potential recruits. Novices served a probationary period ranging from a few weeks or months to a year during which they were introduced to monastic life and given time to accustom themselves to its disciplines and routines. In larger monasteries, novices had their own quarters where they studied religious texts and were taught singing. Other parts of the curriculum included learning the customaries of the house and the system of sign language that could be used when silence was mandatory, as at mealtimes. At Canterbury Cathedral Priory novices had to pass examinations in Latin grammar, logic, and philosophy before they could ‘profess’ their vows of obedience, chastity and poverty.
Monk being given a tonsure, from De similitudinibus, c. 1220.
Admission to any Order saw new monks given the tonsure – a symbolic shaving of the head imitating the crown of thorns worn by Christ during his Crucifixion. At Eynsham Abbey (Benedictine: Oxfordshire), the experience went further; new recruits were ordered not to lower the hood (cowl) of their habit for three days until their heads were ceremonially uncovered and they emerged, like Christ from his entombment, into the light of their rebirth as servants of God.
Thereafter any who attempted to run away would be hunted, found, returned and punished.
Fan vaulting in the east cloister alley at Gloucester Abbey (Benedictine: now Gloucester Cathedral), dating from the third quarter of the fourteenth century.
