Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (13 page)

It was a philosophy that seems to have appealed to a surprising number of people, and news of Benedict's sanctity spread throughout the region. He ended up founding his own monastery. There he wrote his famous Rule (or set of regulations) which became the foundation stone of the monastic movement in the Middle Ages.

As far as he was concerned, he was founding a community where men worked and prayed ‘for the service of the Lord', and he didn't want it to be too strict. The Rule states: ‘We hope to introduce nothing harsh or burdensome.' However, Benedict was a Roman patriarch, and he put a great emphasis on obedience. And not just any old obedience – it had to be instantaneous, unquestioning and done with a good grace.

And don't think you could get away with just putting a good face on it:

For if the disciple obeys with an ill will and murmurs, not necessarily with his lips but simply in his heart, then even though he fulfil the command yet his work will not be acceptable to God, who sees that his heart is murmuring. And, far from gaining a reward for such work as this, he will incur the punishment due to murmurers . . .

As well as disliking ‘murmuring' Benedict wasn't a fan of laughter: ‘As for coarse jests, and idle words, or words that move to laughter, these we condemn everywhere with a perpetual ban.' He also laid down that monks should not speak except when given permission to do so by their superior. And to avoid what he called ‘the vice of private ownership', they should own nothing, have no private possessions, and beds were to be examined frequently by the abbot to make sure they hadn't hidden anything.

Otherwise, Benedict's Rule gives detailed instructions for the monastic community – the number, order and choice of psalms and the hours of offices, the correction and punishment of monks, the way they are to sleep, what and how much they should eat (no meat unless they were very ill) and even what sort of person the cellarer should be. If a monk went on a journey he was forbidden to relate what he might have seen or heard outside the monastery, which Benedict saw as a hermetically sealed, self-contained unit.

The main ways in which the Rule can be said to avoid anything ‘harsh or burdensome' is that, unlike some regimes, it did not prescribe a starvation diet or demand sleep deprivation. It also allowed monks to wear clothes appropriate to the climate – though no mention is made of underpants, an important omission, as we shall see later.

For the next half millennium, Benedict's Rule was disseminated throughout the monasteries of western Europe – first under the aegis of Pope Gregory the Great and then under Charlemagne. By the eleventh century his form of monasticism had a virtual monopoly of religious houses, but whether he would have approved of the way his Rule was being interpreted is quite another matter, as a would-be monk by the name of Herluin found out.

HERLUIN BECOMES A MONK

Herluin was a Norman warrior who, at the age of 40, decided he was getting too old for the business and became a conscientious objector. Besides, he had been told that he would go to hell if he killed people. He determined to trade in his sword for a prayer book and become a monk, and in 1031 he walked into a monastery to see what it was like. As his biographer, Gilbert Crispin, records, he got quite a surprise.

After offering a prayer he approached the door of the cloister with great reverence and nervousness, as if it were the gate of Paradise: he was very eager to find out what was the way of life of the monks, and what were their customs. He saw that they were all far from observing the serious way of life which the monkish life demands; he was distressed, now completely uncertain what kind of life he should choose. At this point the warden of the monastery saw him entering and, thinking him to be a thief, hit him as hard as he could on the neck and dragged him out of the door by his hair . . .

Vita Herluini

Herluin had gone to the trouble of teaching himself to read and write, and was not to be put off so easily. He tried again:

Next Christmas he went for the same purpose to another, better-known monastery. As the brethren went out in festive procession on this solemn day, Herluin saw the monks smile at the lay folk all around with unbecoming familiarity, delighting in showing off their lavish ornamentation, and as they got to the door, quarrelling noisily as to who should go first. One monk punched his fellow who was jostling to get in, and then laid him flat on his back on the ground. Such, as we have said, were still the barbaric manners which were common throughout Normandy.

Vita Herluini

Herluin ended up building his own small monastery. The local bishop ordained him as a monk and made him abbot, so his monastic career was obviously off to an excellent start. He lived as he thought a monk ought, eating one light meal a day, wearing old, black woollen robes and combining hard physical work with regular prayer according to the monastic rules laid down by St Benedict. He soon attracted an enthusiastic little community, and had to build a bigger monastery at the village of Le Bec-Hellouin, southwest of Rouen in Normandy, to accommodate it.

It may seem surprising that an ex-warrior like Herluin should take the strict observance of Benedict's precepts so seriously. But, strange though it may seem, the activities of monks – cloistered and cut off from the world though they may have been – were regarded as an essential back-up to the Norman military machine.

SAVING THE SOULS OF FIGHTING MEN

The problem goes back to that inconvenient Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill.' In the eleventh century this was taken to mean what it said: Thou shalt not kill. And just because you were having a war was no excuse. This was a bit awkward if you happened to be a fighting man, professionally engaged in the business of breaking that commandment in particular (amongst many others).

Like most people, however, warriors had every confidence in the power of prayer. They were also convinced that the purer and simpler a person's life was, the more likely God was to listen favourably to them. Since monks were supposed to live the purest and simplest of lives their prayers were seen as a hotline to God, and they provided an essential service for the Norman armies – saving warriors' souls once the fighting was over.

The soul of a tenth- or eleventh-century fighting man would not be easy to save. It required the strenuous effort of a significant number of monks to pray him out of damnation. Homicide in a public war, even at the command of a legitimate ruler, required doing penance for 40 days and abstention from church. William the Conqueror, with overall responsibility for some 10,000 deaths, needed (if anyone were ever to do the arithmetic, which they did not) about 1100 years of serious religious effort. He would not have finished yet – not until 2162.

After the Battle of Hastings each Norman soldier was told to do 120 days' penance for every man he had killed, which would have created even greater problems. But of course the Church was ever willing to subcontract the work, at a price. If William's penance was split between a couple of hundred monks, his soul could be cleansed in less than six years. He founded an abbey at the site of the battle. He founded another at Barking in Essex; and another at Selby in Yorkshire (he had to kill a lot of people in Yorkshire). And he and his wife and sons, perhaps feeling insecure, gave a great deal more money and land to a great many other churches and abbeys.

In fact, by the time William died, 26 per cent of all the land in England belonged to the Church.

THE MONASTIC CATCH-22

It became the custom for rich people and fighting men like the Norman soldiers, whose ways of life put their souls in such great jeopardy, to pay monks to do the praying they were too busy to do for themselves. This had one profound effect: prayer became a commodity. It gained a commercial value and this was eventually to prove the undoing of the whole system.

The essential thing about monks was their religious way of life – the fact that they lived lives of poverty, simplicity and devotion. The snag was that the poorer, simpler and more devout a particular institution was, the keener the rich and violent were to shower money and land on it to assuage their consciences.

Thus the poorer, simpler and more devout a monastery was in its beginnings, the more likely it was to get rich and powerful quickly. And once it became rich and powerful it was no longer, by definition, poor and was therefore less likely to remain simple and devout.

MONASTERIES AND POWER

There was also a built-in tendency for the monastic movement to accumulate power. Even when the rulers of monasteries were ostensibly confronting the worldliness of their institutions, they simply couldn't help becoming powers in their own right . . .

When Herluin was building his monastery at Bec, for example, a rather celebrated Italian scholar, by the name of Lanfranc, turned up. Lanfranc had initially come to Normandy because he had heard that there was a dearth of learning in the region and thought he would be able to ‘gain wealth and honour' there. He then decided to move into the area of religion. Perhaps still in pursuit of wealth and honour, he decided to seek out the poorest and most despised monastery he could find – which happened to be the ex-soldier's humble establishment at Bec.

Herluin, as someone with plenty of fighting experience but no book learning, welcomed the famous scholar with open arms, and gave him special treatment in the monastery. This bred envy amongst the other monks, and Lanfranc soon announced that he was off to become a hermit. Herluin dissuaded him by offering him the post of prior.

Lanfranc now started rebuilding the monastery's abbey in a more substantial manner, and became less interested in hermetic ways and rather more interested in his developing friendship with William, Duke of Normandy – the future William the Conqueror.

Lanfranc seems to have helped to persuade the pope to back the duke's invasion of England, and after the Conquest William repaid him by installing him as archbishop of Canterbury. The 70-year-old Lanfranc was the spiritual edge of the Conqueror's sword. He imposed Norman abbots, bishops and forms of worship on Anglo-Saxon churches and abbeys. His aim was to obliterate the distinct Anglo-Saxon religious tradition, and he removed all but two of England's saints from the English Church's calendar.

This meant their shrines were no longer in operation. English saints were replaced by foreign ones who took over places of worship just as foreign secular lords had taken over land. The shrine of St Cuthbert at Durham, for example, was eliminated in 1072 (his remains having been evacuated by fleeing monks in 1066) and replaced with a Benedictine priory staffed by reliable monks, and a new Norman castle. The new Norman bishop of Durham was Walcher of Lorraine, who paid William £400 to be made Earl of Bamborough. He lived in the castle as prince-bishop, with the right to raise an army and levy taxes, and was protected by a gang of thugs. The bishop and his cronies were killed in a popular uprising in 1080.

All the while Lanfranc, an Italian archbishop in the service of a Norman warlord, wrote letters about ‘we English' and ‘our island'. It was presumably in the role of proprietor that he stripped the English Church of its valuables, sending its great works of art and books to France, Normandy and Rome, and melting down its gold and silver.

Of course, all this was done in the name of ‘reform'. Lanfranc was able to accuse the English Church of being as sloppy in its ways as Herluin had found the Church in Normandy to be. There were only about a thousand monks in all England, and men in holy orders were even allowed to marry. That, of course, was stopped quite abruptly. The archbishop imposed more discipline on his monks, and encouraged the Norman victors to pay for new abbeys – which were far more glamorous than Anglo-Saxon ones.

The reality was that the Church was synonymous with power, and Lanfranc set an example of prelate power that would retain its force for centuries. Even William bowed to it. He conceded that the Church should be able to hold its own courts for its own people, and that monks and priests would not be subject to royal jurisdiction.

It was an act of power, not piety, for Lanfranc to appoint the totally illiterate Herfast as bishop of East Anglia. The man was a standing joke in Normandy, but a useful thug in England. An even more useful thug was Tousain, the man Lanfranc installed as abbot of Glastonbury. The monks there sang Gregorian chants that had been introduced by St Augustine when he evangelized the southern English, but Tousain told them to use new ones approved by Rome. He stationed archers inside the abbey to ensure obedience. When the monks began to sing their beautiful old chant, and it swelled to echo from the vaulted ceiling, the archers shot 21 of them.

But, although Lanfranc was clearly a man deeply interested in power, he always accepted the overlordship of Duke William – now King of England. He never challenged the king's right to appoint archbishops.

There was another monastic movement, however, that was not prepared to submit to any lay power.

THE CLUNIACS AND POWER

In 940, Duke William of Aquitaine decided that by paying for monks to do their monkish thing in his old hunting lodge at Cluny in Burgundy he would buy himself a place in heaven. The duke noted with engaging candour: ‘Although I myself am unable to despise all things, nevertheless by receiving despisers of this world, whom I believe to be righteous, I may receive the reward of the righteous.'

The problem was, as Duke William saw it, that even when proper godly men had been selected they needed to be protected from violent men like himself while they were quietly praying for his soul. He decided that the best solution was a hearty curse on anyone who messed with the monks. They should know they would go to hell: ‘Let him incur the wrath of almighty God; and let God remove him from the land of the living and wipe out his name from the book of life . . . let him incur everlasting damnation.'