Exploring Medieval Monasteries, part 2

Hello. The quest for isolation that saw the first monks in Egypt head out into the desert was adapted in Britain to islands and remote isolated places. There aren't many remains of these early sites but in this film I'm going to explore some of them and try and build a picture of what they might have looked like. The rugged west coast of Ireland is dotted with islands and remote barren peninsulas so lots of suitable sites and this is where some of the first monasteries are established. But it's worth remembering that even in these isolated places the monks are going to need the permission of a ruler in order to settle. And from the west coast of Ireland and from Brittany and elsewhere the monks travel out as missionaries. Iona, in the Hebrides just off the Isle of Mull. The monastery there was founded by Saint Columba and 12 companions in 563. Now we don't know if it was Columba who converted Bridei, the king of the Picts. I strongly suspect that Bridei had already converted to Christianity and it is he who invites Columba and his companions and makes Iona available to them as a base to build their monastery from where they can travel out and spread the word amongst his people. And Iona we think of as isolated and it is of course but this early medieval period with sea lanes so busy, probably not so remote at that time as we might imagine. Today's thriving community on Iona was founded in the late 1930s. That's when the abbey church and the buildings were restored but I can show you an engraving from the middle of the 18th century with the abbey church in ruins. In addition to Iona there are other possible early foundations that we can tentatively identify by association with saints, by topography, by place names and very occasionally we get a documentary reference. A monastery at King Garth on the Isle of Bute has been connected with Saints Cathan and Saint Blane, both 6th century saints. There's a site that can't be investigated because it's beneath a cemetery at Hoddam in Dumfries and Galloway but it's referenced in an 8th century letter by Alcuin, the scholar and clergyman from York and in that letter it makes clear that the monastery had been established for some time and the local church dedication is to a 6th century saint, Saint Kentigern. At the Brockerbursey, an uninhabited island connected to the mainland of Orkney by a tidal causeway, has got a late Viking era monastery but evidence of something there much earlier. What were these early monasteries like? There is no agreed set of features discernible in the archaeological record so far by which an early British monastic site can be defined. Now this may emerge as more studies are carried out but I think what we're looking at is probably best described as a monastic village. We have monks or nuns or both because many of these early houses were dual houses, living in individual cells or huts with central buildings for communal use, so stores, dining hall, chapel or chapels because evidence for two chapels on many of these sites. Now whether that reflects a dual house, one for men and one for women or whether it is something to do with one for the community, one for lay people, which would reflect the knave chancel distinction in a modern church, we can't be sure. But the site then surrounded by a wall or a bank in a ditch, a physical separation from the outside world, setting aside the sanctified space. And then there might be satellite hermitages, outside but associated with the complex. And life would have been pretty basic and pretty tough. Columba is said to have slept with a stone for a pillow but this is the life they sought of course, the life they wanted. Some of the remains in the west of Ireland are the best that we have surviving. There's a wonderful site at Skellig Michael off the coast of County Kerry and you can see beehive huts and there are cemeteries, gardens and oratory, memorials, markers and small gardens. At Iona, the medieval and some later buildings then overlie that earliest site and those first buildings of St Columba, those individual huts themselves would have been made of mud and wood. They're not going to survive. You can still see the remains of the surrounding bank and ditch that survives as an earthwork. And it's the extent of continuity on a site which governs the surviving archaeology. There's a fairly well-preserved site at Tyree. Now the chapel you can see on the site is medieval, it's St Patrick's Chapel but there are other remains of a much earlier monastery around and you can see a stone with an incised cross and it's on a remote part of the island. There are other sites, the Treshnish Isles off Mull and the Garvillex Archipelago in the Inhebrides off Jura. The southernmost of that archipelago has got a remote site, its name is Eilish an Neve, which means the rocky place of the saints and it's above a very narrow landing place and what I've got in the picture here is an artist's impression based on the standing remains and we can inset those standing remains. You can see an enclosure, beehive cells, grave markers with crosses, two chapels. There's a strong case for early monastic sites, probably all of them with outlying hermitages, in Wales at Bardsey Island off the Clame Peninsula. An early Welsh name translates as the island of 20,000 saints and a monastery was reputedly founded here by St Cadfan. He was a Breton monk around about 516 but there's some scholarly argument that it might even have been earlier but what we can see today are the remains of the medieval St Mary's Abbey. On Anglesey at Penmon we have the ruins of a medieval priory next to St Cyriol's church but alongside is St Cyriol's well and the outline of an earlier monastic cell or a hermitage. So this is St Cyriol's hermitage then we're dating back to the 6th century. He was the founder of a priory here that was destroyed by the Viking raids and just offshore there's a small island called Priestholm with some early remains and a 12th century church. Staying on Anglesey at Caergybi, St Kibbe founded a religious house here in the 6th century inside the walls of a 3rd century Roman fortlet. Current St Kibbe's church is 13th century and later. On Caldey Island we have a record of the first abbot who's a man called Pyrrho, 6th century. He is probably not the founder of the monastery, the founder is probably St Eltut. Viking raids again caused the demise of the abbey here in the 10th century and then the priory was re-established in the 12th century by a group of Benedictines who were there until dissolution in 1536. Present abbey was built by Benedictines in 1906, they'd gone by the late 1920s and it became home to some Cistercian monks from Belgium. St David's, the bishopric and an associated monastery were founded in the 8th century but the monastery was almost certainly the continuity of an earlier establishment, not in this same sheltered valley site but more likely close by where we have earthworks that suggest that on a peninsula. Just off the coast is Ramsey Island which was the site of a hermitage. This was St Justinian's hermitage, he was a Breton, 6th century saint and Justinian was the confessor to St David. Now next time I'm going to stay in Wales, I'm going to look at what is probably Britain's earliest centre of learning. 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