Meetings were held in church and announcements were made there. Business and farming matters were discussed in the nave, and the bells in the tower were rung to bring people’s attention to the seasonal demands of the agricultural year, the planting of beans, or the pruning of apple trees. Plays were performed in church, and festivals celebrated with music and dancing. Here manorial courts and sometimes even markets were held. And here, with much drinking of ale in the churchyards afterwards, baptisms, marriages and funerals all took place.
Babies were baptized as soon as possible, often on the very day of birth, the midwife holding the child by the font round which acolytes carried lighted tapers while the priest intoned the words of the service. It was a brief ceremony, as was that of a wedding which was celebrated at the church door. First banns of marriage were published, as they still are now. A book of instruction required the priest to ‘thryes ask in holy chyrche … eche day on this manner: N. of V. has spoken with N. of P. to have her to his wife, and to ryght lyve in forme of holy chyrche. If any mon knowe any lettying qwy they may not come togedyr say now or never on payne of cursying.’
This same book of instruction for priests sets down the following form for the marriage itself:
N: Hast thou wille to have this wommon to thi wedded wif
R: Ye Syr
N: My thou wel fynde at thi best to love hur and hold ye to hur and to no other to thi lives end
R: Ye Syr
N: Then take her by yor hande and saye after me: ‘I N, take thee N, in forme of holy chyrche, to my wedded wyfe, forsaking alle other, holdying me hollych to thee, in sekeness and in hele, in ryches and in poverte, in well and in wo, tyl deth us departe, and there to I plyght ye my trowthe.8
The ceremony of a funeral was generally far more elaborate than that of a wedding. At John Paston’s funeral at St Peter’s Hungate in Norwich there were thirty-eight priests in attendance, twenty-three nuns and sixty-five choristers, both men and boys, as well as a prioress with her maid, an anchoress and four torch-bearers. Later at Bromholm Priory, where Paston’s body was taken, fourteen ringers were employed to toll the priory bells and ninety-four servitors, paid at the rate of 3d or 4d a day, to wait upon the guests.9
The amount of food and drink consumed by these guests was enormous. So it was at the funeral feast given in memory of Thomas Stonor a few years later. A document in the Stonor Papers lists an extraordinary variety of dishes served on this occasion, including, ‘for priests etc.’, ‘first: chicken broth, capons, mutton, geese, custard; the second course, soup, hotch-potch of meat and herbs, capons, lamb, pork, veal, roasted pigeons, baked rabbits, pheasants, venison, jelly’.10
Yet the funeral and its subsequent feast were often the least heavy expenses in bereaved well-to-do families. There were Masses for the souls of the departed to be paid for, sometimes in perpetuity, chantry chapels to be endowed, monuments to be raised, effigies carved, tombs inscribed, stained glass windows to be fitted, chapels built, or vestments and sacred vessels purchased. And by such means as these, the churches of the country became increasingly rich, commodious and ornate.11
By the end of the thirteenth century there were already more than 8000 churches in England, the responsibility for whose upkeep lay partly with the priests, partly with his parishioners who commonly raised money at church ales. These events, at which villagers were encouraged to drink as much as they could, were usually held in the churchyard or in a building known as the church house nearby. The ale-wife was generally asked to suspend her brewing for as long as they lasted. Some went on for three days. At the Deverills in Wiltshire in the thirteenth century, bachelors who could still stand up were allowed to go on drinking for nothing. Other parishes resorted to blackmail: at St Andrew’s Church, Plymouth, only the second-best copes were used for the funerals of parishioners who had not been sufficiently generous to the church in their wills.12
As the number of churches steadily grew, so did the number of monasteries. After the formation of the Benedictine monastery at Canterbury by St Augustine towards the end of the sixth century, there had been no foundations other than Benedictine in England until the reformist order of Cluny etablished a priory at Lewes in 1077. Less than thirty years later over half of England’s seventeen cathedrals were monastic; and in the twelfth century Cistercian and Carthusian houses were founded in various parts of the country, such as the Cistercian houses of Rievaulx and Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire and the Carthusian Witham in Somerset. In 1131 Gilbert, grandson of a rich Norman knight, founded the Gilbertine Order, the only monastic order to originate in England. He persuaded seven good women of the parish to live in a building adjoining the church and to abide by a rule of life like that of the Cistercians. Lay sisters were encouraged to join the Order and then lay brothers to help farm the land. Finally priests were appointed to serve the joint community. Other foundations rapidly followed; and by the time of St Gilbert’s death in 1189 there were nine Gilbertine houses of both men and women in the country and four of canons only. In the double houses nuns were required to keep to the north side of the church, the canons to the south, and an ordinance provided for a partition wall ‘high enough so that canons and nuns cannot see each other, but not so high that the nuns cannot hear the celebration of Masses at the canons’ altar’.13
This was the period in which monasticism flourished most usefully and profitably in England. Many monasteries were seats of learning and centres of art. In them noble chronicles were compiled and beautifully illuminated; charity and hospitality were dispensed; abbots were called upon to lend their wisdom to the rulers of their country; kings and nobles made gifts of land and money to respected houses and hoped in return to save their souls; schools and hospitals were established; lovely buildings were erected; the wool industry expanded as sheep, under the skilful care of the monks, cropped the grass of the dales.
Since then, however, these earlier virtues of monasticism had been gradually eroded, as religious houses grew so wealthy that their income seems to have been at one time almost a fifth of the whole national income. The original strict rules imposed upon the orders began to be widely ignored. No longer did monks confine themselves to the cloister, observe the regulations about obedience and poverty, conscientiously say the Masses enjoined upon them by past benefactors, or pay too strict a regard to the rules framed to limit their diet. Meat, once provided only for the sick, was now enjoyed by all in the infirmary; and when this was forbidden by papal statute, a special room was set aside, a kind of half-way house, usually known as the ‘misericorde’, ‘the chamber of mercy’, between the infirmary and the refectory, where meat was freely allowed upon the table. This, too, was prohibited by papal statute; but in 1339 the pope, recognizing that the prohibition was unenforceable, conceded that the monks might continue to relish their meat in the ‘misricorde’ provided that only half their number did so at a time, the other half maintaining the vegetarian rule elsewhere.14
As early as 1177 Giraldus Cambrensis had been astonished by the extravagant fare enjoyed by the monks of Canterbury. In his autobiography, written in the third person, Giraldus recorded:
Sitting then in the hall with the Prior and the greater monks at the high table he noted there, as he was wont to relate, two things, these were the excessive superfluity of gestures [by the monks who were forbidden to speak to each other] and the multitude of the dishes. For the Prior sent so many gifts of meat to the monks who served him, and they on their part to the lower tables, and the recipients gave so many thanks and were so profuse in their gesticulations of fingers and hands and arms and in the whisperings whereby they avoided open speech, (wherein all showed a most unedifying levity and licence) that Gerald felt as if he were sitting at a stage play or among a company of actors and buffoons; for it would be more appropriate to their Order and to their honourable estate to speak modestly in plain human speech than to use such a dumb garrulity of frivolous signs and hissings. Of the dishes themselves and their multitude what can I
say but this, that I have oft-times heard him relate how six courses or more were laid in order (or shall I not say in disorder?) upon the table; and these of the most sumptuous kind. At the very last, in the guise of principal courses, masses of herbs were brought to all the tables, but they were scarcely touched, in face of so many kinds of fishes, roast and boiled, stuffed and fried – so many dishes tricked out by the cook’s art with eggs and pepper – so many savouries and sauces composed by that same art to stimulate gluttony, and to excite the appetite. Add to this, that there was such abundance of wine and strong drink – of new wine and mead and mulberry wine, and all intoxicating liquors in so much abundance – that even beer, which the English brew excellently (especially in Kent), found no place; but rather beer stood as low in this matter as the pot-herbs among other dishes. I say, ye might see so excessive and sumptuous a superfluity here in meats and dishes as might weary not only the guest who partook thereof, but even the beholder. What then would Paul the Hermit have said to this? or Anthony? or Benedict, father and founder of monastic life? … The Church, in proportion as she hath grown in wealth, hath much decreased in the virtues.15
In the later Middle Ages most monks seem to have done quite as well for themselves as those Giraldus saw guzzling at Canterbury. At Westminster the abbey’s household records show that the fish supplied was required to be the best obtainable in the market, and that each monk was to have a plentiful supply of bream or mullet, flounders or herring or ‘salted Cambridge eels’. At the far less well endowed abbey at Spalding, the daily allowance of four eggs or fish for each monk was increased, under the terms of an abbot’s will, to six. All may not have been eaten, but the reports of visitations suggest that the surplus was less often given to the poor than to friends of the monks who came to meals with them.16
While food and drink were enjoyed in abundance, manual labour, which had been insisted upon by St Benedict, was gradually abandoned as being both beneath a monk’s dignity and unnecessary in foundations which had become so affluent. Work in the fields was not only given up but also work in the monastery where the duties of cooking, washing, and even shaving the brethren were performed by servants who also worked in the gardens and cut the cloister grass. In the richer houses there were more servants than monks. At the same time, although monasteries were still the principal distributors of charity to the poor – for whom the State as a whole made no provision – the money given away was, in most cases, a very small proportion of total income. Indeed, the surviving accounts of English monasteries indicate that never so much as a tenth of their income was paid out in charity.17
The strict observance of celibacy had long been abandoned with that of poverty. A visitation of Flaxley Abbey in 1397 revealed that nine monks were fornicators and that the abbot himself was ‘defamatus’ with three different women. Discipline at Flaxley was unusually lax, but there is no doubt that celibacy in monastic houses was no longer strictly observed, and that the monk, far from living in conditions of austerity and abnegation, was more likely to resemble Chaucer’s whose passion was hunting and whose clothes were as expensive as any knight’s:
The Rule of good St Benet or St Maur
As old and strict he tended to ignore;
He let go by the things of yesterday
And took the modern world’s more spacious way.
He did not rate that text at a plucked hen
Which says that hunters are not holy men
And that a monk uncloistered is a mere
Fish out of water, flapping on the pier,
That is to say a monk out of his cloister.
That was a text he held not worth an oyster …
This Monk was therefore a good man to horse;
Greyhounds he had, as swift as birds, to course.
Hunting a hare or riding at a fence
Was all his fun, he spared for no expense.
I saw his sleeves were garnished at the hand
With fine grey fur, the finest in the land,
And on his hood, to fasten it at his chin
He had a wrought-gold cunningly fashioned pin …
Supple his boots, his horse in fine condition.
He was a prelate fit for exhibition,
He was not pale like a tormented soul.
He liked a fat swan best, and roasted whole.18
While monks came from all classes, until the later Middle Ages nuns were recruited almost exclusively from the richer families, often from those which had failed to find husbands for them. Abbesses of the Benedictine Barking Abbey included three queens and two princesses. Illegitimate daughters were also sent to nunneries; so were the wives of noble rebels, young women of fortune whose guardians or families wanted to get their own hands on their money, daughters of weak health or unsound mind as well as those of recognized vocation. They were usually required to bring a dowry with them and they were expected to be able to read and sing, though not necessarily to write. They were for the most part at least sixteen years old before they were accepted as novices, though much younger girls were taken by some nunneries where they were educated to the required level of literacy.
The number of nuns in the country was never great, perhaps no more than 2000 at the most; and most nunneries were very small institutions. A few had schools attached; others had hospitals to which not only sisters were admitted when ill but also relatives. Yet, as in monasteries, most of the hard work in nunneries was carried out by lay servants, the nuns themselves being occupied in more leisurely pursuits such as needlework. Many nunneries, indeed, were more like pleasant holiday retreats than the religious houses which would have once satisfied St Benedict. Private sleeping chambers seem to have been more usual than dormitories, and small dining-rooms than communal refectories.
There were severe prioresses such as the one at Catesby who dragged her nuns about ‘even in choir’ but most appear to have been as easy-going as the Abbess of Shaftesbury who, in the fourteenth century, secured a dispensation to take a year’s holiday so that she could ‘reside in her manors for the sake of air and recreation’.19 The records of visitations indicate that, although dancing and entertainments by minstrels were forbidden except at Christmas, there was widespread jollity in many nunneries at all seasons. The Prioress of Stamford had to confess to the Bishop of Lincoln that one of her nuns had run off with a harpist with whom she had gone to live in Newcastle-on-Tyne. In 1387 it was discovered that at Romsey the nuns habitually took their pets, rabbits, birds and dogs, into church with them. At another nunnery they took their squirrels.20 And at Langley, a guest staying in the convent took with her ‘a great abundance of dogs, insomuch that whenever she comes to church there follow her twelve dogs, who make a great uproar’.21
In many convents the nuns were permitted to bring their own clothes. And even when wearing the habits required by their order’s regulations, they did not always deny themselves the pleasure of jewellery; while wimples, originally intended to conceal as much of the face as possible, were so arranged as to reveal the temples and the chin and were elegantly pleated like that worn by Chaucer’s prioress whose ‘forehead, certainly was fair of spread’:
Her cloak, I noticed, had a graceful charm.
She wore a coral trinket on her arm,
A set of beads, the gaudiest tricked in green,
Whence hung a golden brooch of brightest sheen
On which there first was graven a crowned A,
And, lower, Amor vincit omnia.
The friar, who accompanied the prioress on the pilgrimage to Canterbury, was equally well dressed, though far less pleasant. Indeed, he appears in a less favourable light than anyone else on the journey. As with the monk, the portrait in the earlier Middle Ages would have been much different. There were four main orders, the Carmelites, also known as white friars because of the colour of their mantles, the Franciscans or grey friars, the Dominicans, the black friars, and the Austin Friars. Later they were joined by the Crutched Friars, or Friars of the Holy Cro
ss, the Trinitarians, or Red Friars, the Pied Friars, or Friars of the Blessed Mary, and the Friars of the Penance of Jesus Christ, the Friars of the Sack. Unlike monks they did not lead a cloistered life but went about the country and into the poorest districts of the towns as evangelists, preaching the word of God, hearing confessions and ministering to the sick. Most of their founders had laid great stress on the need for poverty not only for individual friars but for the order as a whole. The Franciscans, for example, had been enjoined to live by manual labour or by begging for sustenance but were not allowed to accept money or to own property. They preached wherever a congregation could be assembled, usually in the open, and gathered around them large and silent crowds who listened fascinated to their sermons, to stories of miracles and fearful punishments, tales of the apostles, the disciples and the prophets, the extraordinary and exciting legends of the saints, and the news that they brought of life in the outside world. Often they offended the parish clergy whose own eloquence was no match for theirs, and whose sermons, when given, were so much more prosaic; and frequently they annoyed the bishops whose indolence or avidity they roundly condemned.
But by the end of the thirteenth century those friars who still adhered to the strict rules of conduct laid down by the founders of their orders were few and far between. With munificent bequests from royal and noble patrons, all the main orders had acquired riches and had been enabled to begin the construction of buildings of great splendour, often on the sites of much poorer houses where their former indigence and good intentions had once aroused the admiration of laity and clergy alike. Henry III, Edward I and Edward II were particularly generous to the Dominicans whose property in London, where their first community had been founded in Chancery Lane in 1221, had spread down to the river and by 1278 included those two huge Thameside strongholds, Baynards Castle and Montfichet Tower. Henry III’s brother, the Earl of Cornwall, as well as Henry III himself, Edward I and John of Gaunt had helped the Carmelites to develop an equally large area upon which a splendid priory appeared. Margaret, second queen of Edward I, Queen Isabella and Queen Philippa were all benefactors of the Franciscans whose Greyfriars Monastery was to be one of the finest in London with a large library built at the expense of Richard Whittington. There were similar magnificent friaries and friary churches throughout England, notably at Coventry where the Carmelites’ church was as impressive as any cathedral, and at King’s Langley where the Dominicans prayed for the soul of Edward II’s beloved Piers Gaveston. Most of the priories, like those at Reading, Southampton, Northampton, Bristol, Newcastle and Chelmsford, have disappeared; but enough remains of the Carmelite friary at Aylesford in Kent for posterity to realize how far, by the time its cloister and sleeping chambers had been completed, the white friars had departed from their founder’s ideals.22
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