Obedience and humility were cornerstones of monastic life. The subjugation of individual will to the Regula was paramount. From the outset St Benedict understood that if the same group of people were to live together for the whole of their lives, stability, discipline and consistency were essential. Hence breaches of the Rule were punished. Monks were expected to confess their sins at the daily chapter house meetings. Accusers were likened to ‘the razor of God’ who sought to remove ‘unsightly hair’ so that the penitent could become ‘more pleasing’.
An artist’s impression of a flogging in the chapter house.
Minor offences such as lateness, laziness or talking during silent periods were punished lightly and serious offences more sternly. Blasphemy, disruptive behaviour or rebellion could result in floggings, deportations to other monasteries, imprisonment or excommunication. At St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury (Benedictine: Kent) the customary advised monks to ‘sit with bowed and covered heads and … have compassion’ if one of their brethren was flogged. When the ruins of Fountains Abbey were excavated in the nineteenth century, several cells were discovered below the abbot’s house, each with an iron staple in the floor for attaching a prisoner’s chains. One cell had the words vale libertas (farewell, liberty) scratched in the wall. In the late middle ages, punishments were less harsh, with errant monks typically excluded from the company of others rather than being beaten.
Detail of Warning to Swearers, a fifteenth-century wall painting in the parish church of St Lawrence, Broughton, Buckinghamshire. A swearer holds a foot, which his blasphemy has torn from Christ’s body.
Some monasteries were less strict than others; newly appointed abbots and visitations by Bishops often discovered lapses. In the early fourteenth century monks at St Albans Abbey were told not to swear by the wounds, blood or limbs of Christ – a common blasphemy rebuked in contemporary wall paintings.
A hundred years later not much had changed: their successors were exhorted to be punctual at Vespers; not to leave the quire during a service in order to walk about the church and talk; not to loiter and chatter at the vestry door; not to swear nor address each other discourteously; and not to go to a nearby nunnery without permission.
Inevitably some monks ran away. Perhaps the tedium was too much; possibly their religious ardour waned; maybe they fell out with the abbey authorities. Such an offence was called ‘apostasy’ and the offenders were usually pursued. Only very rarely was a woman involved. The Records of Eynsham Abbey for 1445 mention a monk who had absconded with a nun from nearby Godstow Priory (Benedictine: Oxfordshire), but who had been brought back to the monastery and was doing penance. An incident with a less happy ending occurred at Rievaulx Abbey in 1279 when a restless monk, William de Aketon, tried to hoodwink the abbot into letting him leave by claiming that he had contracted leprosy and thus posed a health risk to the others. After a suspicious obedientiary demanded to examine him, William drew a knife and stabbed his interrogator before fleeing into the woods. When he was caught shortly afterwards he was savagely beaten and died a few days later in the monastery.
Although poverty was another key vow taken by professed monks, it rarely meant that they lived like genuinely poor people. On the contrary, many monks had a relatively high standard of living compared to the wider population, with diets, accommodation and sanitation far better than average. From the thirteenth century Benedictine monks often received wages; at Peterborough Abbey (Benedictine: Cambridgeshire, now Peterborough Cathedral) they received £25 a year.
A better interpretation of the vow is that monks eschewed personal possessions. Thus a monk’s clothes and bedding belonged to the community, not to the wearer, and monks were not supposed to own their furniture.
The clothing consisted of two tunics (habits) and two cloak/hoods (cowls) together with an apron-like garment known as a scapula which was worn for work. Shoes, stockings and a belt were also issued. St Benedict’s rules about clothing had been written for monks in southern Europe; additions allowed for the harsher winters in Britain included trousers, caps and woolly socks. Carthusian monks habitually wore a scratchy hair shirt below their habit to remind them of humility and to curb sensual pleasures.
Stained glass, c. 1524–6, depicting an episode from the Life of St Bernard, formerly in the cloisters of the nunnery of St Apern (Cistercian: Cologne, Germany), now in the parish church of St Leonard, Marston Bigot (Somerset).
Novice monks were taught how to wear their habits: not to let them drag along the ground; not to let others see them naked; how to avoid eye contact by keeping their hoods up while using the latrines; not to leave their clothes in a mess.
Sexual chastity was another of the defining vows of a monk. Self-control and denial was reinforced by stories and images, rules and regulations. The experiences of holy men were held up as examples to the young. At Worcester Cathedral Priory the cloister glazing included scenes from the early life of St Wulfstan (c. 1008–95), the last Anglo-Saxon Bishop in England, who reputedly jumped in a bramble bush to quell his lust when an attractive young woman attempted to make ‘a shipwreck of his chastity’. At the parish church of St Leonard at Marston Bigot (Somerset) a panel of sixteenth-century glass displaced from the cloisters of a German Cistercian abbey depicts St Bernard of Clairvaux in bed shouting ‘Fures, fures’ [Latin: ‘thieves’] after a promiscuous innkeeper’s wife had tried to ‘steal his chastity’. A ban on eating red meat was another way that monks imagined physical desires could be curbed, and some monks may have resorted to self-flagellation to suppress their sensuality. Misogamy was rife, and a flirtatious woman was to be feared as a reincarnated ‘Eve’, whose temptations could lead to spiritual disaster. Homosexuality was a serious offence and senior monks patrolled the dormitory and latrines at night to prevent any possible misbehaviour.
Plaited metal scourge excavated at Rievaulx Abbey (Cistercian: Yorkshire).
Cases of sexual immorality were fewer than is often presumed. Between 1347 and 1540, for example, only fifteen cases of sexual impropriety were recorded in the numerous religious houses of Yorkshire.
St Benedict said next to nothing about friendship. In the modern sense of the word it was probably assumed to be part of the world that monks had chosen to leave behind. While monastic authors extolled the ideas of communal friendship (amicitia) as a way of reaching God, private friendships may have been regarded as incompatible with these ideals. Even so, surviving letters between some monks hint at personal emotional bonds. The wills of two former monks at St Albans Abbey, who died in 1540 and 1545 respectively, requested burial side by side.
Just as friendships could bloom, so too could dislikes, factionalism and conflict. In 1394 the monks at Hailes Abbey were told to stop reviling one another; in 1433 a monk at Combe Abbey (Cistercian: Warwickshire) fled to Waverley Abbey (Cistercian: Surrey) blaming ‘the malice of his rivals’; when Bishop Richard Nix (alternative spellings include Nyx, or Nykke) visited Wymondham Priory (Benedictine: Norfolk) in 1514 he was told that the prior had suffered a breakdown, attacking some of the monks with a stone and drawing a sword on another.
Former refectory (1330s), Worcester Cathedral Priory, now part of the adjacent King’s School.