Exploring Medieval Monasteries, part 1

Hello and welcome to a new adventure exploring medieval monasteries and I'm using the term monastery as a kind of generic shorthand covering the full range of monastic houses, abbeys, priories, friaries, convents, the full range. You do not see many monks or nuns around today. In the late middle ages practically everybody would have had contact with a religious house. Beginning of the 1530s there were over 800 monasteries in England and Wales. A decade later they'd all vanished. These institutions that had dominated social and economic life for centuries gone in a very short period. Why were monasteries founded and who by? And motives change over time. How were the sites chosen? What were the requirements? What made a site suitable? How were the monastic buildings designed and laid out? How were monasteries run? What were the differences between the various orders? How did a movement predicated on austerity become so rich and so powerful? And why were they suppressed and with what impact? These are some of the questions we're going to tackle as we follow the history of monasticism from its earliest beginnings through to dissolution in the reign of Henry VIII. And we may pick up at the end on monastic revival which really doesn't begin until the 19th century. The history of monasticism in this country has a very disrupted chronology. The first monastic houses appear at the end of the 5th century. By the late 9th century they've mostly disappeared and it's largely due to the depredations of Viking raids. The first devastating attack on a monastery by the Vikings was at Lindisfarne in 793. Then we get a bit of a patchy revival from the middle of the 10th century but not too many sources. After the Norman conquest there are far more documents and by the time we get to the 12th century there's a big expansion in monasteries then there's plenty of evidence and source material that we can we can draw on. The first dissolution act was passed by parliament in February 1536. The last abbey to surrender was Waltham Abbey in Essex March 1540. Now when that first act was passed there was something like 848 monasteries in England and Wales. So just four short years for all of those to be dissolved and a court of augmentations was set up to run the estates while the land and the property was either leased or sold off and the money went into the exchequer. Today we have some ruined remains, some of them very impressive. We think of places like Fountains Abbey and Revo both in Yorkshire. They just speak of wealth and power. Cleve Abbey in Somerset, Tinton Abbey in Monmouth. Many sites now in the care of English Heritage or Caddo in Wales or the National Trust. We also have ghosts at the core of private houses. Many of the sites became private houses after they'd been sold off. The Padgett family took over and made Burton Abbey their home. Famously Laycock Abbey still retains a lot of its earlier fabric. At Waltham Abbey, Abbey House was built using the Abbey stone and you find names like that. Abbey House, The Priory, The Friary, The Grange which may be clues to a connection in the past to a medieval monastic site. But you need to be careful because sometimes these names are just chosen because they have a cachet, they sound good, perhaps people think they give a status. And as well as houses you get Abbey Fields, Priory Lands, Abbey Road, Abbey Street, Friargate, all names that may well have links to the past. Some monastic churches survived because they became parish churches. Tewkesbury, the Abbey Church, became the parish church. At Waltham, just the nave of the old monastic church was converted into a parish church. And there's a corpus of folklore and legend that attach to Abbeys. Quite often there are rumours of secret tunnels, often in highly improbable places. And these stories may have their origins in water management systems, drainage tunnels etc. The monks were very good at water engineering. Monasticism as a way of life began in Egypt in the late 3rd century. St Paul of Thebes and St Anthony separately went to live as hermits in the desert. Devote themselves to lives of asceticism and prayer and contemplation and their example was followed by others. What was the attraction of the desert? Well it offered solitude where you could seek spiritual fulfilment away from the distractions of the everyday world. And of course there was a biblical precedent. In the Gospel according to St Matthew, chapter 4, Christ is tested in the wilderness. And that passage goes on with the injunction, man shall not live by bread alone but by every word of God. And these hermits became known as the Desert Fathers. They gained a reputation as holy men and because of that they gathered followers, adherents, I suppose today we'd say a fan base. The result was that religious communities formed and that dichotomy of the solitary life and the community, that dual aspect of monasticism, which is a thread throughout its history, is there from the very beginning. The word monastery comes from the Greek monos, alone, but you have communities. And the early monks lived very simple lives. They lived in caves or ramshackle shelters, sometimes in the ruins of ancient Egypt's old tombs and temples. The first true monastery was started round about 320 by St Pacomius at Tabernesi in Upper Egypt. And Pacomius had been a soldier and his community grew to about a hundred and he wrote for them a code of conduct, how the community should organise and run itself and the rules it should obey. The first monastic rule. But that monastery, the lifestyle, became very influential and it spread through the Middle East into the Byzantine Empire, Greece, then into Italy, and then into Gaul. And religious houses are being founded in Gaul by St Martin of Tours in the 4th century. So when did the monastic idea arrive in the British Isles? Well in the mid 5th century we have St Patrick founding religious houses on the rugged west coast of Ireland. And from there missionaries are coming to mainland Britain, the southwest peninsula, Wales, Scotland. And after Patrick in the 6th century there are others who follow in his footsteps, St Columba, St Columbanus, St Finian, St Brendan. And in Britain the quest for the desert had to be adapted. Not a lot of desert in Britain. And the sites that these early missionaries sought out were islands, remote marshy places, and desolate hilltops. And that may well explain why Glastonbury Tor was chosen for an early monastic site. Practically an island in the early medieval period anyway. The old Welsh Brittonic name, Inys Glas, Island of Glass. And we know there's a monastery on the tour by 700 because we have the document that tells us Ina, the king of Wessex, visited the holy old church at Glastonbury in the year 700. Excavation on the site found an early cemetery and a boundary bank of pottery which took occupation back into the 6th century. Not necessarily a monastic settlement but quite likely to be. And we have the legends of course associated with Glastonbury, famously that Joseph of Arimathea, the man who gave his tomb for Christ, the man who helped take Jesus down from the cross, supposedly the first custodian of the Holy Grail, visited Glastonbury Tor in the first century with an infant Jesus. And that story of course is inspiration for William Blake's famous lines, and did those feet in ancient times walk upon England's mountains green, and was the holy lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures seen. And this search for remote places in which to found religious houses is a dominant theme in early monasticism and that is where I'm going to pick up next time, so join me then. 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.