by Alan Ereira
ITEM: On the feast of St Thomas the Apostle and in the Feast of St Michael the Archangel they shall have three years and forty days of pardon . . .
But the chief way to attract holy tourism was to possess a famous relic. This could be anything from an object belonging to a saint, or touched by them, to a bit of their skeleton. Such an object was regarded as a contact point between earth and heaven that radiated miraculous power. Churches and abbeys did everything possible to get hold of sacred relics for people to visit.
Saints’ relics were a sufficiently important source of revenue for Anselm, Lanfranc’s successor as archbishop of Canterbury, to reinstate the English saints; they were, after all, far more likely to draw a good crowd. A new shrine was constructed for Cuthbert at Durham, and his remains were restored there.
At Canterbury, St Thomas Becket’s tomb in the cathedral was also to become a major draw – more particularly, the saint’s head. You could see where the sword had split his skull in two! Visitors could also marvel at the sight of ‘Aaron’s rod’, ‘some of the stone upon which the Lord stood just before He ascended into heaven’, ‘some of the Lord’s table on which the Last Supper was eaten’, and even ‘some of the very clay out of which God fashioned Adam’. There was also some of the Virgin Mary’s knitting – well, weaving to be exact.
THE CHURCH COMMERCIALS
Monasteries were trading operations, and communities even founded their own towns to handle the trade. This brings us back to Bury St Edmunds and its war between the monks and the townspeople. The town belonged to the abbey, which had benefited so much from various kings that it also owned the entire county of West Suffolk. The abbots built or expanded the town of Bury St Edmunds, and controlled its commercial life. Every business transaction involved a cut for the monks – whether a tradesman ran a barge on the river, a stall in the market, sold fish or supplied building materials. The abbey administered justice and pocketed the fines it took. It ran the royal mint – being abbot of Bury St Edmunds was literally a licence to print money. The abbey even owned the horse droppings on the street – and of course the monks took their cut.
Whether it was collecting manure or grinding corn, every abbot guarded his monopoly jealously.
Take Adam Samson, for example, who ran Bury with a rod of iron in the later twelfth century. One day he learnt that the dean, Herbert, had built a windmill without permission. Samson ‘boiled with fury and could hardly eat or sleep.’ He summoned Herbert and told him: ‘I thank you as much as if you had cut off both my feet! By the face of God! I will never eat bread until that building is destroyed!’
It was a subtle hint, but Herbert took it and destroyed the mill immediately.*3
By 1327 the townspeople had had enough. In January they stormed and plundered the abbey demanding a charter of liberties. When they were cheated of this they attacked again in February, and then again in May. The monks’ raid on the parish church, on 18 October, was reprisal for these attacks.
Some years later, in 1345, a special commission investigated the abbey for other reasons, and found that the monks lived away from it, dressed like everyone else and were up to anything and everything.
Throughout the monastic movement, austerity proved to be quite incompatible with monastic wealth. One of them had to go. Unfortunately, even acknowledging the financial incompetence of many abbots, it was not going to be the wealth.
THE HYPOCRISY OF MONKS
Fortunately for the consciences of the monastic community, monks of all orders proved to have a genius for finding a variety of ways of living within the letter of Benedict’s Rule, while leaving it dead on the cloister pavement.
For example, no well-to-do monk wanted to sleep in a cold dormitory with all the other monks, so, since the infirmary was the only place where a fire was allowed, monks with money began to move in there, establishing individual ‘bachelor pads’ – each a private room with its own fireplace, and with a bedroom above complete with en-suite lavatory.
Benedict had prohibited ‘eating the flesh of four-footed animals’, but an exception was made for the sick. So meat was available in the infirmary – or misericord (‘compassionate heart’) – where dietary regulations were suspended for the infirm or elderly. And guess what? Pretty soon the brothers gave up eating in the refectory and ate in the misericord instead. Monkish logic.
Another snag about eating meals under Benedict’s Rule was that the monks were not allowed to talk while dining. But they could sign if they wanted something . . . like the salt. (Benedict actually says they can communicate sonitu signi – ‘by sound of a sign’.) So they compiled an entire sign language. They would also whistle to each other.
Gerald of Wales describes a visit to Christ Church, Canterbury, in the twelfth century, during which he was appalled at the way the monks behaved during meals. It was, he claimed, ‘more appropriate to jesters . . . all of them gesticulating with fingers, hands and arms, and whistling to one another in lieu of speaking’.
The same signs were used in monasteries all over Europe – a sort of dumb Esperanto. So whatever country a monk found himself eating in he could always convey exactly what he wanted to a fellow monk. Most of the signs were about food – which isn’t surprising because in a monastery there was an awful lot of food to talk about . . .
DINING WITH MONKS
Benedict had in mind a frugal diet for monks. He advised only two cooked dishes at a meal, and one pound of bread per monk per day. However, most monks took this advice with a pinch of salt – and a lot more.
Food was of absorbing interest to medieval monks. For example, one chapter meeting of the monks of Westminster was preoccupied with the question of whether a particular dish should include four herrings or five. At Bury St Edmunds, the thirteenth-century book of rules and customs records an important discussion about how long a pike should be for the Feast of Relics. It was eventually decided that it should be 22 inches long from head to tail.
Every week contained at least one feast day on which the unfortunate monks would have to deal with something like 16 dishes. But even on a normal working day the menu available to them was one that most lay folk could only have dreamt about. The records for Westminster Abbey, for example, show that on a typical day beef, boiled mutton, roast pork and roast mutton were served at dinner in the misericord, while meat fritters and deer entrails were served in the refectory. Later, at supper, there was tongue and mutton – with sauce.
One historian, Barbara Harvey, has calculated that the daily allowance for the monks of Westminster could have been as much as 7000 calories – over twice the daily requirement of an average man today. Of course, it is not inevitable that they ate all this– what they left would be given to servants or the poor at the monastery door. But monks were habitually made fun of in literature as being fat, and now the archaeological evidence seems to be bearing out the caricature.
Excavation of the medieval hospital and priory of St Mary Spital in London has produced the bones of thousands of monks and their patients. It is clear that the monks were taller than the lay people (suggesting they were better nourished all their lives) and had much worse teeth (indicating a sweeter diet).
Monks were equally serious about drink. In his Rule, Benedict admits to some misgivings about recommending how much anyone ought to drink, but bearing in mind ‘the standards of the weak’ he recommends a hemina (half a pint) of wine a day. Mark you – it was only a recommendation, and the monks treated it with caution. Recent studies have shown that alcohol seems to have accounted for something like 19 per cent of monks’ energy intake (it provides 5 per cent of ours).
Gluttony was not the only sin monks fell prey to. Records for 1447 note a brothel in Westminster called the ‘Maidenshead’, which was much frequented by Benedictines. With up to £12 pocket money a year, the monks could afford to go there. And churchmen did not just use brothels; they owned them. The bishop of Winchester was the owner of one of the brothels in Borough High Street in London –
the girls were known affectionately as ‘Winchester geese’.
RESISTING THE MONKS
In 1348 the whole monastic system in England came close to collapse when the Black Death killed off something like two-thirds of all people in holy orders. In enclosed monastic communities it spread like the plague – you might say.
Many of the communities never recovered. At the Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx, for instance, a population that had once numbered 400 was reduced to just 18 people by 1381. Only three of them were lay brothers. The situation at Fountains Abbey was similar. Since the Cistercian system depended on these working pseudo-monks it had ceased functioning.
But while their religious communities declined, monasteries lost nothing of their wealth. They retained their lands, their riches, their political power. This may have made little sense previously, but now the disproportion between such wealth and so few monks became a public scandal. Popular hostility to the ‘private religions’, as they were called, inevitably grew.
People once more looked back to a ‘golden age’ in which monks had lived lives of simple poverty and work, but those lives were totally incompatible with the huge properties that the abbots were supposed to run. In fact, something quite extraordinary was happening. The Church itself was the great teacher of morality, insisting that power and privilege were justified only in relation to the responsibilities that went with them. Churchmen had, since the twelfth century at least, emphasised the moral failings of every level of society, with particular emphasis on the failings of churchmen themselves. In the thirteenth century the Church had begun to encourage the use of English for prayer and study by ordinary people. But within 100 years this freedom of expression was being used by the lay population to criticise abuses within the church, and that was a very different kettle of fish.
A mass of materials from the fourteenth century tell this story. It is there in popular ballads, such as the early ones of Robin Hood, which treated monks and abbots with contempt, and depict a powerful contrast between them and wandering friars and preachers, whose Christianity was not practised within a wealthy and politically well-connected institution. It shows in popular religion too, for example in The Book of Margery Kempe, where an illiterate bourgeois woman describes her religious experiences, and has no hesitation in dealing directly with her maker, without the Church acting as her intermediary. This is also the core theme of Piers Plowman, in which the only ‘indulgence’ on offer is a paper saying ‘Do well, do better, do best’, and in which the ploughman himself is identified with Christ and must save the world, including the Church.
The intellectual core of criticism was provided by the foremost academic of his day, John Wyclif. From his base at the University of Oxford, he issued a devastating deconstruction of ecclesiastical corruption and hypocrisy. This powerfully moral attack on the Church erupted in the national uprising of 1381. Modern historians tell us that the causes of the revolt were economic and political, but in 1381 the Church itself had no doubt that the chief instigators were John Wyclif and his followers who had been busy for the last decade stirring up criticism of the ecclesiastical hierarchy for the precise reason that the church now lay at the heart of the economy and of politics. The rebels beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury and many abbeys came under attack.
At Bury St Edmunds the abbey was once again sacked and looted. The prior was executed and his severed head stuck on a pike in the Great Market. At Norwich the rebels were unfortunate enough to run into a fighting bishop, Henry Despenser, who for most of his ill-spent youth had been one of the pope’s military commanders. The bishop happened to be fully armed and armoured. He personally executed the leader of the party.
The uprising was crushed, but the Church’s critics were not. Wyclif continued to insist that the clergy ought not to own property, and that the king could legally confiscate any held by the Church. It was an interesting proposition to which many theologians felt they could subscribe. But the men who then ran the Church were not theologians. The most powerful bishops and archbishops were career politicians, with little or no theological training. For them the Church was a political and economic power base. There was no way these proud and wealthy prelates were going to heed a call for a return to biblical simplicity and poverty. They would do whatever they could to hold on to their wealth and power.
THE CHURCH DEFENDS ITSELF WITH FIRE
Their tactic was not to defend the indefensible but to go on the attack. Luckily for them, Wyclif had challenged the official Church position on the Eucharist – the part of the Mass where the bread and wine are blessed and become the body and blood of Christ. Since 1215, the line had been that a miracle takes place, and after the blessing there is no bread and no wine left – they become, despite what our senses tell us, flesh and blood.
However, the Church in England had never pressed this point and people were left to interpret the miracle as they liked. Wyclif proposed that the bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ in a spiritual or symbolic sense. It was a proposition that would have roused little controversy in the past, but after 1381 the worldly bishops, headed by the aristocratic and powerful William Courtenay, archbishop of Canterbury, saw the issue as a block on which to lay the heads of the Church’s critics. From 1401 archbishops were able to enjoy the privilege of handing over anyone who suggested that the bread and wine were not literally the body and blood of Christ to be burnt at the stake – a brutally effective way of retaining the status quo.
Nonetheless, opposition to corruption in the Church struggled on. In 1410 there was an attempt to pass a Bill in Parliament to strip the Church and the monasteries of their assets. But Henry IV had been helped to the throne by the then archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, and the Bill was indignantly rejected. In fact, an abject Commons had to beg for it to be struck from the record.
THE END OF THE MONASTERIES
The unpopularity of the monasteries simmered under the surface. When religious houses were founded as penance for the murder of Richard II, it was very difficult to find anyone to inhabit them. Syon monastery near London, for instance, was occupied by a Swedish order of nuns, who later took over another of the new foundations at Brentford, also near London, which had remained empty since being established.
Nuns had, in fact, replaced monks in people’s minds as being value for money. The classic idea of a nunnery had been a place of retreat for well-off ladies with nowhere else to go; but in the decades that followed the Black Death the attitude to women in religious life changed rather dramatically.
Nuns evidently chose to live by different standards from those of monks with their rich endowments and glorious buildings. People seem to have been much more conscious of this by the fifteenth century, and also to have become aware that if they were donating funds for anniversaries, for pittances, for regular prayers, for burial, women were more likely to deliver the goods. Wealthy men and women frequently made bequests to ‘the poor nuns who will pray for their souls’, and increasing numbers of women’s religious houses were founded. This suggests that women’s prayers were perceived to have more efficacy than men’s, and that donors and patrons thought nunneries were doing a better job than monasteries.
Monks and nuns were both finally swept away in the years following 1535, when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and redistributed their phenomenal wealth among his cronies. The inquiry by Thomas Cromwell which led up to this produced a spectacular list of abuses and scandals, none of which represented anything new, but which were now being exposed in a world in which reform, rather than abolition, hardly seemed an option any more.
And all we have left are beautiful fairy ruins . . . that whisper of a life of dedication and piety and simplicity that became corrupted on a magnificent scale.
Perhaps money is the root of all evil.
Of course, there were always sincere and dedicated monks who devoted themselves to a life of prayer and religious contemplation. But looking back through the story of the mona
steries it’s possible to conclude that once prayer had acquired a monetary value, the game was up. The monasteries – the prayer factories – became commercial enterprises; and subsequently there was just no way they could fulfil their original function.
Monks couldn’t really cut themselves off for ever from the wicked world, no matter how hard they tried. They were part of the wicked world and, what’s more, a lot of the time they ran it. But they were never allowed to get away with it unscathed. Criticism and condemnation was constant; it was the motor that drove one new monastic movement after another, and ultimately pulled down the entire edifice. The true legacy of the medieval church in England, and all those fat monks, is the powerful sense of social justice that the monastic movement itself taught, that it used to speak out against its own corruption, and that in the end became the weapon that destroyed it.
And that has shaped political debate in England ever since.
CHAPTER FIVE
PHILOSOPHER
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Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night.
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
ALEXANDER POPE’S EPITAPH for Sir Isaac Newton, written in 1730 (three years after the great man’s death), seems to tell us all we need to know about medieval science. The natural philosophers of the Middle Ages floundered in ignorance and superstition until Newton changed the study of the world by basing his investigations on experiment and mathematics.
The typical medieval experimental philosopher was, supposedly, a man like the thirteenth-century Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, hunting for the philosopher’s stone. Bacon was an alchemist who tried to turn base metals into gold, pursuing delusions, and who was then forbidden by his own order to continue his strange experiments.