Exploring Medieval Monasteries, part 16

Hello. Initial grants of land from founders enabled monasteries to get started. Thereafter, it was down to the community to exploit that land, maybe add to their portfolio, in order to support themselves. And estates required management. So monasteries are more than religious institutions, they're also businesses. The medieval economy is predominantly agricultural, so chiefly we're talking about farming, but monasteries were also involved in exploiting whatever resources were available to them. That might be iron or lead or salt, perhaps stone quarries. Either managing these enterprises directly or renting them out. Now, if you look at an ordnance survey map, you find lots of monastic connections in place names, villages, woods, mills and parishes with names like abbots or monks or priors attached to them. We think of Darley Abbey in Derby, Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire, Aston Abbots and Monks Risborough in Buckinghamshire, Monkland in Hereford, Monksgate, Sussex, Monkwood, Hampshire, Abbotsbury in Dorset, famous today for its swannery. That was begun by the Benedictine monks who farmed the birds for the table. Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire, Stoke Pryor in Hereford and Worcester, Pryors Norton in Gloucester. These names are pretty reliable indicators. Now Grange may point to a monastic farm, but sometimes it can just be a fashionable name that's been adopted, so a little less reliable. But this is One Ash Grange near Moni Ash in Derbyshire, still a farmhouse, offers holiday accommodation as well, but originally set up by the Cistercian monks of Roche Abbey in South Yorkshire. And some of the outbuildings remain from that medieval period. This may have been a cold store and we can see inside. Quite a lot of monastic estate buildings have survived. Among the most impressive are the great barns and the dovecotes. Now dovecotes in the medieval period were a prerogative of the manorial lords. Ownership was controlled, possession was a status symbol, and they provided eggs, fresh meat and fertiliser. This is Kinwarton dovecote in Warwickshire. This belonged to the Benedictines of Evesham Abbey. And this is Dunster dovecote in Somerset. This belonged to Dunster Priory, a Benedictine outpost of Bath Abbey. The cylindrical shape accommodates a revolving ladder. It's set on pivots. This provides access to the nesting holes for the pigeon keeper, who was known as a culverer. And the mechanism looks rather cumbersome, it's called a potence, but it can be so finely balanced that these can be turned with a finger. This is Penmont Priory on Anglesey, belonged to an Augustinian priory. There are a thousand nesting holes inside, so if think two birds in each nesting hole who might have a clutch of two, we could be looking at a dovecote that contained anything up to 4,000 birds. Now monastic barns are often wrongly called tithe barns. Tithe barns were built to hold one tenth of the produce of a single parish. They're usually quite small. Monastic barns were built as a central grain store for the entire produce of an estate, which might encompass several manors, and of necessity they needed to be large. Many of those that survive are now in the care of the National Trust or English Heritage. This is Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire, now in the care of English Heritage, but belonged to the nuns of Shaftesbury Abbey, and we can see inside. This is Great Coxwell Barn in Oxfordshire, now looked after by the National Trust. This belonged to the Cistercians of Bewley, and again we can see inside. This is the crook-framed interior of Leigh Court Barn in Worcester, which belonged to Pershore Abbey. This is Buckland Abbey Barn in Devon, and this is the crown-post roof of Cogshall Grange Barn, which belonged to the Cistercians of Cogshall Abbey, near Colchester in Essex, now in the care of the National Trust. And there are several private farms and manor houses that are wrapped around earlier monastic farm buildings. This is Place Farm, Tisbury in Wiltshire, did formerly belong to the Benedictine nuns of Shaftesbury Abbey, and the gatehouse and the great barn have survived. The bureaucratic nature of monastic institutions means they left us lots of records, chronicles, cartularies and surveys, often very detailed, and give us information on how they managed their estates, how land was drained, woodland cleared, etc. And in these documents, the monastic farms, the term usually used is grangia. The word comes from Latin grania, which means grain, and ultimately gives us our word grange. And the monastic granges might be set within a village, or they might be isolated in the countryside. They will have the same range of buildings as any other medieval farm, but possibly on a larger scale. In addition to cowsheds and barns, they might have their own smithy, perhaps a fish pond. A house may be for the granger, the farm manager, cottages for the lay brothers. And even where buildings haven't survived, archaeology can unpick the history. This is Royston Grange, it's near Ballydon in Derbyshire, and it belonged to Garendon Abbey. The land was given to Garendon Abbey in the mid-12th century by Adam of Hart Hill, and the site's been excavated by Sheffield University. And of the medieval grange, they identified one building as a dairy. It was bow-shaped, 54 feet by 38 feet, one end paved, a central hearth for warming milk to preserve it, and a separate parlour room with an oven. Now this dairy had fallen out of use in the 14th century, and a series of drains dug beneath it showed that the site had simply become too waterlogged. The 14th century was a very wet century. Later in the 14th century, the farm at Royston was rented out rather than managed directly. And again, this is typical of what happens to monastic granges in this period. The impact of the Black Death means there is less peasant labour, so many farms that had been managed directly are now rented out. The present Royston Grange is late 18th, early 19th century, but it uses recycled stone from the medieval grange, and earthworks and platforms of buildings can be seen nearby. There's also a building that looks rather like a chapel. In fact, it's a pumping house, and it provided pneumatic power at one time for the drills operating in the nearby quarries. It needed a water supply, so it was set next to a spring, and the existence of that spring is probably why this area was occupied in the first place. Now next time, I'm going to look at how monastic activity helped to shape the landscape. If you've enjoyed this video, hit the like and subscribe buttons, and click on the notification bell to be informed when the next video is released. Or you can subscribe by clicking on the rose window over my shoulder.