Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (15 page)

TURNING FAITH INTO MONEY

Abbeys simply could not help but become huge financial machines. Abbeys never married and never died, so that their land never came onto the market, and were outside the medieval merry-go-round of land redistribution through violent death and confiscation of estates. There were occasional exceptions, such as Rievaulx being plundered by the Scots after they defeated Edward II's army in 1322, but such misfortunes were rare.

Given the natural processes that poured money towards abbeys like rain running down gulleys, it took some kind of special genius for an abbot to run into financial trouble, but it happened with impressive frequency. There was a tendency to spend ever more lavishly, to invest ever more grandly, and to finance these noble activities by borrowing money against future income, for example, selling wool from their sheep years in advance at a discount. It was a form of gambling, of course, but with God on their side what could go wrong? Sheep murrain for a start. In the 1280s, Rievaulx was unable to deliver the wool it had pre-sold and was driven into the medieval equivalent of bankruptcy. It was taken into Royal protection, under the supervision of the Bishop of Durham.

With forward contracts concentrating their minds, many abbots became more concerned with the activities of the large numbers of lay brothers than anything else. They became in effect Managing Directors who tended to regard the ‘choir monks' as rather a burden on the place, even if they were from more socially acceptable families.

They needed to find ways to improve their cash flow, and that was the attraction of the pilgrim business. In the eleventh century, sinners were instructed that a visit to a particular church, and the bestowal of pious gifts upon it, would mean they would be let off their penance. The number of qualifying churches steadily grew until there were thousands of pilgrimage churches. And the reward changed, in the thirteenth century, from a remission of penance to a release from God's punishment, whether in this life or in purgatory. In the fourteenth century pilgrim indulgencies were extended even further, negating guilt itself and giving the opportunity of acquiring an indulgence for the souls of those already in purgatory.

What's more, if you decided not to take the pilgrimage you could achieve the same result by paying the Church the money you would have spent if you had gone. The Holy Grail of the tourist trade had been found: ‘Don't bother to visit, just send your money!'

The system meant that abbeys, cathedrals and churches were in competition with each other to attract the most pilgrims, and there were several ways of doing this. The first was to offer indulgences and pardons for pilgrims. Some churches ran ‘bargains of the month'. The monastery at Shene, in Surrey, for example, offered the following in the fifteenth century:

ITEM:
On the Feast of St John the Baptist whoever comes to the monastery and devoutly says a Pater-noster shall have ninety days of pardon . . 
.

ITEM:
On the Feast of Mary Magdalene whoever comes to the said monastery shall have one hundred days of pardon granted by Bishop Stafford, Archbishop of Canterbury . . 
.

But the chief way to attract holy tourism was to possess a famous relic. This could be anything from an object belonging to a saint, or touched by them, to a bit of their skeleton. Such an object was regarded as a contact point between earth and heaven that radiated miraculous power. Churches and abbeys did everything possible to get hold of sacred relics for people to visit.

Saints' relics were a sufficiently important source of revenue for Anselm, Lanfranc's successor as archbishop of Canterbury, to reinstate the English saints; they were, after all, far more likely to draw a good crowd. A new shrine was constructed for Cuthbert at Durham, and his remains were restored there.

At Canterbury, St Thomas Becket's tomb in the cathedral was also to become a major draw – more particularly, the saint's head. You could see where the sword had split his skull in two! Visitors could also marvel at the sight of ‘Aaron's rod', ‘some of the stone upon which the Lord stood just before He ascended into heaven', ‘some of the Lord's table on which the Last Supper was eaten', and even ‘some of the very clay out of which God fashioned Adam'. There was also some of the Virgin Mary's knitting – well, weaving to be exact.

THE CHURCH COMMERCIALS

Monasteries were trading operations, and communities even founded their own towns to handle the trade. This brings us back to Bury St Edmunds and its war between the monks and the townspeople. The town belonged to the abbey, which had benefited so much from various kings that it also owned the entire county of West Suffolk. The abbots built or expanded the town of Bury St Edmunds, and controlled its commercial life. Every business transaction involved a cut for the monks – whether a tradesman ran a barge on the river, a stall in the market, sold fish or supplied building materials. The abbey administered justice and pocketed the fines it took. It ran the royal mint – being abbot of Bury St Edmunds was literally a licence to print money. The abbey even owned the horse droppings on the street – and of course the monks took their cut.

Whether it was collecting manure or grinding corn, every abbot guarded his monopoly jealously.

Take Adam Samson, for example, who ran Bury with a rod of iron in the later twelfth century. One day he learnt that the dean, Herbert, had built a windmill without permission. Samson ‘boiled with fury and could hardly eat or sleep.' He summoned Herbert and told him: ‘I thank you as much as if you had cut off both my feet! By the face of God! I will never eat bread until that building is destroyed!'

It was a subtle hint, but Herbert took it and destroyed the mill immediately.
*3

By 1327 the townspeople had had enough. In January they stormed and plundered the abbey demanding a charter of liberties. When they were cheated of this they attacked again in February, and then again in May. The monks' raid on the parish church, on 18 October, was reprisal for these attacks.

Some years later, in 1345, a special commission investigated the abbey for other reasons, and found that the monks lived away from it, dressed like everyone else and were up to anything and everything.

Throughout the monastic movement, austerity proved to be quite incompatible with monastic wealth. One of them had to go. Unfortunately, even acknowledging the financial incompetence of many abbots, it was not going to be the wealth.

THE HYPOCRISY OF MONKS

Fortunately for the consciences of the monastic community, monks of all orders proved to have a genius for finding a variety of ways of living within the letter of Benedict's Rule, while leaving it dead on the cloister pavement.

For example, no well-to-do monk wanted to sleep in a cold dormitory with all the other monks, so, since the infirmary was the only place where a fire was allowed, monks with money began to move in there, establishing individual ‘bachelor pads' – each a private room with its own fireplace, and with a bedroom above complete with en-suite lavatory.

Benedict had prohibited ‘eating the flesh of four-footed animals', but an exception was made for the sick. So meat was available in the infirmary – or misericord (‘compassionate heart') – where dietary regulations were suspended for the infirm or elderly. And guess what? Pretty soon the brothers gave up eating in the refectory and ate in the misericord instead. Monkish logic.

Another snag about eating meals under Benedict's Rule was that the monks were not allowed to talk while dining. But they could sign if they wanted something . . . like the salt. (Benedict actually says they can communicate
sonitu signi
– ‘by sound of a sign'.) So they compiled an entire sign language. They would also whistle to each other.

Gerald of Wales describes a visit to Christ Church, Canterbury, in the twelfth century, during which he was appalled at the way the monks behaved during meals. It was, he claimed, ‘more appropriate to jesters . . . all of them gesticulating with fingers, hands and arms, and whistling to one another in lieu of speaking'.

The same signs were used in monasteries all over Europe – a sort of dumb Esperanto. So whatever country a monk found himself eating in he could always convey exactly what he wanted to a fellow monk. Most of the signs were about food – which isn't surprising because in a monastery there was an awful lot of food to talk about . . .

DINING WITH MONKS

Benedict had in mind a frugal diet for monks. He advised only two cooked dishes at a meal, and one pound of bread per monk per day. However, most monks took this advice with a pinch of salt – and a lot more.

Food was of absorbing interest to medieval monks. For example, one chapter meeting of the monks of Westminster was preoccupied with the question of whether a particular dish should include four herrings or five. At Bury St Edmunds, the thirteenth-century book of rules and customs records an important discussion about how long a pike should be for the Feast of Relics. It was eventually decided that it should be 22 inches long from head to tail.

Every week contained at least one feast day on which the unfortunate monks would have to deal with something like 16 dishes. But even on a normal working day the menu available to them was one that most lay folk could only have dreamt about. The records for Westminster Abbey, for example, show that on a typical day beef, boiled mutton, roast pork and roast mutton were served at dinner in the misericord, while meat fritters and deer entrails were served in the refectory. Later, at supper, there was tongue and mutton – with sauce.

One historian, Barbara Harvey, has calculated that the daily allowance for the monks of Westminster could have been as much as 7000 calories – over twice the daily requirement of an average man today. Of course, it is not inevitable that they ate all this– what they left would be given to servants or the poor at the monastery door. But monks were habitually made fun of in literature as being fat, and now the archaeological evidence seems to be bearing out the caricature.

Excavation of the medieval hospital and priory of St Mary Spital in London has produced the bones of thousands of monks and their patients. It is clear that the monks were taller than the lay people (suggesting they were better nourished all their lives) and had much worse teeth (indicating a sweeter diet).

Monks were equally serious about drink. In his Rule, Benedict admits to some misgivings about recommending how much anyone ought to drink, but bearing in mind ‘the standards of the weak' he recommends a hemina (half a pint) of wine a day. Mark you – it was only a recommendation, and the monks treated it with caution. Recent studies have shown that alcohol seems to have accounted for something like 19 per cent of monks' energy intake (it provides 5 per cent of ours).

Gluttony was not the only sin monks fell prey to. Records for 1447 note a brothel in Westminster called the ‘Maidenshead', which was much frequented by Benedictines. With up to £12 pocket money a year, the monks could afford to go there. And churchmen did not just use brothels; they owned them. The bishop of Winchester was the owner of one of the brothels in Borough High Street in London – the girls were known affectionately as ‘Winchester geese'.

RESISTING THE MONKS

In 1348 the whole monastic system in England came close to collapse when the Black Death killed off something like two-thirds of all people in holy orders. In enclosed monastic communities it spread like the plague – you might say.

Many of the communities never recovered. At the Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx, for instance, a population that had once numbered 400 was reduced to just 18 people by 1381. Only three of them were lay brothers. The situation at Fountains Abbey was similar. Since the Cistercian system depended on these working pseudo-monks it had ceased functioning.

But while their religious communities declined, monasteries lost nothing of their wealth. They retained their lands, their riches, their political power. This may have made little sense previously, but now the disproportion between such wealth and so few monks became a public scandal. Popular hostility to the ‘private religions', as they were called, inevitably grew.

People once more looked back to a ‘golden age' in which monks had lived lives of simple poverty and work, but those lives were totally incompatible with the huge properties that the abbots were supposed to run. In fact, something quite extraordinary was happening. The Church itself was the great teacher of morality, insisting that power and privilege were justified only in relation to the responsibilities that went with them. Churchmen had, since the twelfth century at least, emphasised the moral failings of every level of society, with particular emphasis on the failings of churchmen themselves. In the thirteenth century the Church had begun to encourage the use of English for prayer and study by ordinary people. But within 100 years this freedom of expression was being used by the lay population to criticise abuses within the church, and that was a very different kettle of fish.

A mass of materials from the fourteenth century tell this story. It is there in popular ballads, such as the early ones of Robin Hood, which treated monks and abbots with contempt, and depict a powerful contrast between them and wandering friars and preachers, whose Christianity was not practised within a wealthy and politically well-connected institution. It shows in popular religion too, for example in
The Book of Margery Kempe
, where an illiterate bourgeois woman describes her religious experiences, and has no hesitation in dealing directly with her maker, without the Church acting as her intermediary. This is also the core theme of
Piers Plowman
, in which the only ‘indulgence' on offer is a paper saying ‘Do well, do better, do best', and in which the ploughman himself is identified with Christ and must save the world, including the Church.