The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (30 page)

Aelred, abbot of Rievaulx from 1147 to 1167, encapsulated the appeal of the Cistercian lifestyle in his
Speculum Caritatis
(Mirror of Love):

our food is scanty, our garments rough; our drink is from the stream and our sleep often upon our book. Under our tired limbs there is but a hard
mat; when sleep is sweetest we must rise at a bell’s bidding … [but] everywhere peace, everywhere serenity, and a marvellous freedom from the tumult of the world.
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Cistercian houses were characterized by their remote sites, by churches which were small and lacking in ostentation, and by domestic buildings arranged around the cloisters in distinctive fashion; the frater was typically placed at right angles to the cloister walk on the opposite side to the church, with kitchen and calefactory inserted either side of it, and the western side of the cloisters was given over to accommodation for the lay brothers who were admitted (mostly from local peasantry) to a vocation of manual work, particularly in the fields. This at least was the intention, and a glimpse of this idealism is still to be seen, for example, in the ruins of Buildwas Abbey (Shropshire), founded in 1135 within the Savignac Order (which merged with the Cistercians 12 years later) and structurally one of the least altered religious houses in the country. At this site, the buildings on the opposite side of the cloisters from the church have disappeared above ground, but a good deal of the remainder can still be seen. The church has a low, squat, central tower, in keeping with the express prohibition by the Cistercian general chapter in 1157 of steeples and belfries, and is only about 60 metres long, with short transepts flanking the crossing; the chancel at the east end is only one bay in length. There is also evidence of a screen separating the lay brothers in the nave from the fully professed monks in the choir.
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Elsewhere, at the abbeys of Furness (Cumberland) and Coggeshall (Essex) we can still find another distinctive Cistercian feature, the gate chapel – located at the gatehouse, deliberately isolated from the main monastic buildings, because the Cistercians discouraged pilgrims and other visitors from worshipping in their monastic church.

But this early idealism was not to last. Orderic Vitalis, writing in Normandy about 1135, was already worried about the Cistercians’ reputation, seeing them as victims of their own success: ‘many seek to be numbered with the true servants of God by their outward observance, not their virtue; their numbers disgust those who see them and make true monks seem less worthy in the faulty judgement of men.’
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Those who visit Cistercian remains today often have some difficulty in recognizing the spirit of asceticism, for several houses within this order grew rich from the estates eagerly bestowed upon them by benefactors, especially during the height of their popularity in the twelfth century. At Rievaulx, for example, the ruined church we now find on the site is some 113 metres long and the three-storey, seven-bay chancel to the east of the crossing occupies over one third of the length of the church: this was built in the early thirteenth century, a clear indication that initial restraint and austerity had already been cast off. Meanwhile, the west range
of the cloisters shows evidence of private rooms on the ground floor and a granary above. At Fountains, the landscape is dominated by a magnificent 52-metres-high tower at the northern end of the north transept of the church, a striking refutation of the decree of 1157 and of the thinking encountered at Buildwas. The story, of course, is one of development over time. The original church at Rievaulx, revealed by excavation, had a modest chancel, only two bays long, while the west range of the cloisters here is the result of redesign in the fifteenth century, after lay brothers had ceased to be recruited (
Figure 25
). At Fountains, the church tower was built very late in the monastery’s history, around 1500 when the abbot, Marmaduke Huby, was energetically recruiting more monks, repairing and rebuilding the abbey’s property, and leaving his mark as a reforming visitor on the order in England as a whole. ‘Huby’s Tower’ gives us an insight into the mixed motives of the builder, carrying both his own initials and emblems and an inscription to the glory of God.
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Figure 25: Rievaulx Abbey (Yorkshire)
. Set in a wooded valley, the abbey developed an extensive farming enterprise, leading in turn to the aggrandizement of its buildings. Accordingly, the church (right) grew into a three-tier structure, with an elongated chancel (in foreground); the frater (to left of the square cloisters) was also substantially remodelled. (English Heritage Photo Library.)

It took a highly selective approach to admissions and to the acquisition of estates if an order’s early inspiration was to be sustained, but among the more successful in this respect were the Carthusians, modelled on a house at Grande Chartreuse in south-east France which had been founded in 1084. This order combined personal isolation and collective organization: the monks lived as a community but had individual cells where they spent most of their time. Recognized by the pope as a new religious order in 1133, the Carthusians deliberately kept recruitment and expansion under strict control, with individual houses typically restricted to a prior and 12 brethren – echoing Christ and his apostles – plus 16 lay brothers, a few elderly monks and a handful of domestic and farm servants. This restrained self-sufficiency was also characteristic of the early Cistercians, but the difference with the Carthusians is that they succeeded in keeping to their rules. Accordingly, the order grew very slowly but mostly remained above criticism. Only nine houses were established in England in total, the earliest at Witham (Somerset) in 1179, but seven of them between 1343 and 1414 when monasticism as a whole was declining in numbers, income and morale. Among these was the best surviving example, Mount Grace (Yorkshire), where we can still see the distinctive Carthusian plan of a cloister surrounded by individual cells, each with its own garden, and the remains of a church, chapter house and frater which were all modest in scale (
Figure 26
). It is no coincidence that, of all the orders of monks, it was the Carthusians which gave Henry VIII most trouble during the 1530s; 18 of their number were executed or starved to death in prison for refusing to take the oath acknowledging Henry’s royal supremacy over the Church in England, and their houses had to be forcibly suppressed.
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Figure 26: Mount Grace Priory (Yorkshire)
. Carthusian monks spent most of their time in solitude within their own cells. This view of the north cloisters at Mount Grace shows the cell foundations, set within individual garden enclosures, and in the distance the monastic church, beyond which were the south cloisters composed largely of service buildings.

A different form of religious life was espoused by communities of regular canons. In origin, these were groups of priests dwelling together in order to serve a church, or sometimes a school or hospital. There was an attempt early in the eleventh century to impose greater discipline on these communities, with Wulfstan Archbishop of York drafting legislation that canons should live chastely and eat and sleep in communal rooms,
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but it was only after 1074, when Pope Gregory VII issued a code based on the writings of the fifth-century North African bishop Augustine of Hippo, that such aspirations come to fruition. Houses of ‘Augustinian’ canons – houses which regarded themselves as following St Augustine’s
Rule
in however modernised a form – spread thereafter through France and Italy, either as new foundations or as a result of existing communities accepting the imposition of the rule. The movement reached England about 1100, although there is uncertainty over which was the first house established here: St Botolph’s, Colchester, St Mary’s Huntingdon and St Gregory’s Canterbury, the first two represented by serving churches today, all have a claim. The order became very fashionable during Henry I’s reign (1100–35) when a further 40 houses were founded, three-quarters of them by members of the royal court.
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Prominent among these was Carlisle, established by the king in 1122 and made a cathedral for a new border diocese 11 years later, although the church today is much shorter than it was before a visit by the Scots in the 1640s.
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Another was Runcorn, founded by William fitz Nigel constable to the Earl of Chester in 1115 to serve his castle chapel and minister to pilgrims and other travellers crossing the River Mersey. After 19 years, this community moved to a more secluded site four kilometres away at Norton; although the original duties remained, it is hard not to see the move as illustrating a tendency within the order generally to withdraw to the more isolated lifestyle normally associated with monks. Norton went on to become one of the larger Augustinian houses in England, with over 20 canons in residence by the thirteenth century, and in 1391 was granted the status of abbey by the pope. Archaeological excavation has revealed a church with domestic buildings arranged around a cloister in customary fashion, the original structures of the mid- to late-twelfth century being partly replaced by, partly incorporated within, larger-scale buildings erected during the course of the thirteenth century, all of which can be visited at the site today.
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These survivals of Augustinian buildings are comparatively rare, since although numerically the canons were almost as popular as the Benedictines – about 200 houses and 2,600 professed canons in England and Wales by 1300, compared to some 225 houses for 3,300 Benedictine monks – they made less impact upon the landscape. Augustinian houses were on average only one-third as well-endowed as those of the Benedictines, since after the initial patronage by the royal court the order descended the social scale,
becoming the favourite of merchants and gentry who could not afford lavish foundations.
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This was inevitably reflected in the more modest scale and elaboration of their buildings, which – given that many were in populated areas – have also tended to fall victim to demolition for re-use of the stone; exceptions such as Haughmond and Lilleshall, about 30 kilometres apart in Shropshire, owe their continued existence – albeit in ruins – largely to their location away from major settlements. However, the canons’ churches have often outlived them. A case in point is Bridlington (Yorkshire), where the canons’ nave continues to serve St Mary’s parish; the crossing, east end and most other monastic buildings were pulled down following the dissolution. Another notable example is St Frideswide’s Priory, Oxford, closed in 1524 so that it could be incorporated into the college Cardinal Wolsey founded on the same site, with the church later being made a cathedral for Henry VIII’s new diocese of Oxford. The Augustinian priory churches at Bristol and Southwark have also survived, from the crossing eastwards, and at Bristol the canons’ chapter-house is also extant; both churches have become cathedrals, Bristol under Henry VIII, Southwark in 1905, although both now have Victorian naves.
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Like the Benedictines, the Augustinians lacked a formal constitution; an Augustinian house was one acknowledged to be following the
Rule of St Augustine
. At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, Pope Innocent III provided for triennial meetings of heads of houses in those orders where such assemblies did not already take place, with the Cistercians initially to advise on how they should be run: a measure which ensured that there was at least a framework to bind communities together.
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But – as with the Benedictines – Augustinian houses tended to develop families, modelled on particularly influential foundations. The Premonstratensians, for example, began in this way. Named after a house at Prémontré in north-east France founded in 1120, they were heavily influenced by the Cistercians: the canons opted for austerity, wore undyed habits and developed a constitution similar to that of the
Carta Caritatis
, which enabled the various affiliated houses to function as a separate order. Like the Cistercians, they favoured underpopulated areas, which meant that, as canons, they were often to be found ministering on the margins of settlement. Some of their best work in Europe was in carrying Christianity to the Slavonic peoples of the east, but they were under-represented in England, where less than 40 houses were established in all. The first of these was at Newsham (Lincolnshire), dating to 1143, though the slightly later Welbeck (Nottinghamshire) was eventually recognized by pope and king as the principal house of the order in England. The Premonstratensians do not feature prominently in the landscape today, but a fifteenth-century battlemented gatehouse is to be found in a typical frontier location at Alnwick (Northumberland), while at a secluded coastal site
at Cockersand (Lancashire), an octagonal thirteenth-century chapter house survives; excavations here in the 1920s revealed a simple, aisleless church, with buildings arranged around the cloisters much as in a Cistercian house (see
Figure 27
).
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