The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (32 page)

But how is all this reflected in the English landscape? There were Dominican (‘Black’) friars in England by 1221, Franciscans (‘Grey Friars’) by 1224, Carmelites (‘White Friars’) by 1242, Austin friars by 1249. Given their reliance upon alms to support their life as mendicant (begging) preachers, one might expect to find them predominantly in centres of population, and numbers of friars’ houses established is indeed a rough and ready guide to the relative size of medieval towns. All four orders mentioned above – the only four orders officially recognized by the papacy after 1274 – were to be found in London, in the two major centres of learning, Oxford and Cambridge, and in several of the top-ranking towns in the 1377 poll tax returns, including York, Bristol, Norwich, Lincoln, Boston, King’s Lynn and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Towns with three orders of friars (among them Gloucester, Leicester, Shrewsbury, Yarmouth, Ipswich) were drawn from the middle ranks of the 1377 returns, while smaller towns such as Lichfield, Ludlow, Derby and Southampton supported only one or two orders each.
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As for the friars’ legacy in these places today, there have inevitably been considerable losses. Despite the initial concern to renounce corporate possessions, the friars did in fact amass sufficient property and income – held for them where necessary by third parties – to allow them to build some substantial churches and accompanying domestic buildings, similar in plan to those of the traditional orders. But their location predominantly in towns means that most of their buildings have disappeared, or at best can be detected only within subsequent structures. Thus the site occupied by the Dominicans of Cambridge was used in 1584 to found Emmanuel College as a ‘spearhead of puritanism’. The founder, Sir Walter Mildmay, wanted as little as possible of the friary to survive and ensured that the new College chapel would not be on the site of the friars’ church; there are traces of it instead within the College buttery.
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Elsewhere, however, their churches do sometimes survive and street names are often a clue to their former presence: the early fourteenth-century Greyfriars Church on Friar Street, Reading (Berkshire) is a prime example of both.

As with other religious orders, it is not difficult to find contemporary criticism whenever standards slipped. The friars were particularly vulnerable
to gossip because they used their wits to solicit alms and win invitations into private houses, were disliked by parish clergy as ‘rival attractions’ liable to divert burial fees to their own churches, and were despised by conventional monks and canons: witness the depiction of the friar as a fox in the miseri-cords of the Benedictine Abbey church of Chester (now Chester Cathedral), which date to about 1380. They also squabbled among themselves, notably over the boundaries of their respective begging districts in towns – the ‘limits’ which led to Chaucer’s depiction of a friar as a ‘limiter’, who would ‘go around the houses, poke and pry’, dispensing ‘flummery and hokum’.
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But all this negativity must of course be unfair to many individuals, none more so than the members of the Franciscan Observants, a new order founded as a breakaway from the Franciscans in 1415 in an attempt to recapture the original idealism. Six houses existed in England by the early sixteenth century, all forcibly suppressed in 1534 after their members had refused to accept the royal supremacy and, in some cases, had preached against the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. Most of the friars were imprisoned, either in gaols or in other Franciscan houses, and at least 32 were put to death.
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All this is worth remembering as we consider the evidence for a decline in monastic observance towards the close of the middle ages.

From the thirteenth century onwards, it was required of bishops that they conduct visitations of religious houses in their dioceses: every few years the members of each community would be summoned individually before their bishop to answer his questions about what was amiss and the bishop would then issue injunctions (instructions) to address what he perceived to be faults. These records were never intended for publication and are liable to give a negative impression because their deliberate purpose was not to praise the good but to correct the bad. But when due allowance is made, the overall impression is that by the late middle ages, while outright scandal was rare, complacency, apathy and demoralization were widespread. Time and again, we are told that religious houses were struggling to run their estates efficiently and to maintain their fabric adequately. Bardney Abbey (Lincolnshire) was visited sometime in 1437–38, when the bishop was told that ‘the dorter, frater, cloister and the other buildings of the monastery are much dilapidated, in so much that the rain comes in’ and visited again in 1440, when there were complaints about the failure to enclose woodland copses after felling so ‘the stumps, when they sprout again, are destroyed’. At Huntingdon Priory in 1439, tensions between the prior and his deputy were all too apparent, as the sub-prior complained that ‘the church, cloister, chapter-house, frater, dorter and all the houses, offices, glass and all the buildings of the granges, manors and appropriated churches belonging to the priory are utterly in ruin in the prior’s default’, an allegation with which several of his colleagues concurred.
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Yet the evidence of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century monastic account rolls suggests that, while estates were now run largely through leasing land rather than by farming direct, most religious houses were able to balance income and expenditure satisfactorily, with sufficient to meet repairs and other contingencies and to keep debts to manageable proportions. Nor is it difficult to cite examples of substantial building work in the late medieval period. Much of Gloucester Abbey, including the cloister walk where fan vaulting was introduced, was rebuilt in the century and a half from the 1330s onwards (
Figure 28
).

Figure 28: Gloucester Abbey Cloisters
. This Benedictine abbey, now a cathedral, was remodelled in Perpendicular style from the 1330s onwards. The work embraced new cloister walks with innovative fan-vaulting and major alterations to the church, including a new central tower. Monastic buildings such as (from left) the chapter house and slype, were less affected.

The church of Bath Abbey is the product of an entire rebuilding, begun in 1499 after its much larger predecessor had fallen into decay. A new west front and nave were built at Winchester between 1350 and 1410, after subsidence had afflicted the previous Norman building; the chapter house at St Augustine’s Canterbury was rebuilt following an earthquake in 1382; a massive central tower was erected at Durham from the mid-1460s after its predecessor had been struck by lightning; a crypt was inserted into the west end of Glastonbury Abbey church about 1500; a new nave, cloister, west transepts and central tower were constructed at Christ Church, Canterbury between 1377 and 1497; Chester’s cloister walks were rebuilt in the 1520s. All serve today as illustrations of the so-called Perpendicular style of the late middle ages, instantly recognizable by the large broad window openings with horizontal transoms and the withdrawal from elaborate, naturalistic sculptural decoration. Yet while all this work suggests that several monastic communities retained their self-confidence – a counter to the impression of demoralization noted above – it is worth stressing that much of it arose either out of necessity, or in special funding circumstances: Gloucester Abbey, for example, profited immensely from pilgrimages to their shrine of the murdered King Edward II, as Christ Church, Canterbury continued to do from housing the shrine of Thomas Becket. It is also fair to say that these examples come from the richest communities: the smaller, less well-endowed houses, including most nunneries, saw far less building activity.
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In general terms, with due regard to these outstanding exceptions, the great age of monastic construction had passed by the middle years of the fourteenth century. Visit any monastic site in England where the foundation predates 1300 and the story is likely to have several common themes. An initial building phase will have embraced the church and the range around the cloisters. The thirteenth century, when numbers were growing and estates were generating a good income, will have seen considerable activity, often involving the replacement of previous buildings: the east end of the church was commonly rebuilt on a grander scale, and domestic accommodation was often enlarged. This phase might continue into the early fourteenth century, but after the Black Death, with reduced numbers and diminished estate income, the picture was generally one of consolidation: repairs where necessary, the adaptation of certain buildings often in the direction of more private accommodation, but few great building schemes.

There are clear signs in all this of the ways in which religious houses changed their appearance to reflect changing roles and – to some extent – the changing lifestyles of their members. As the Cistercians encountered growing difficulty in recruiting lay brothers – especially once population fell in the fourteenth century – so their western ranges were converted to storerooms and private accommodation. And, increasingly, rooms had to be found by the late middle ages for ‘paying guests’ to help make ends meet: ‘corrodians’ who paid a lump sum for admission and were then maintained by the house for the rest of their days. Obviously, the short-term solution could beget a long-term problem, especially since these people could turn out to be a considerable distraction. The bishop’s visitation of the Benedictine nunnery of Langley (Leicestershire) in 1440 records several complaints about the disruption to worship caused by Lady Audeley bringing her dogs to church, while an inventory drawn up at the dissolution of Lilleshall Abbey (Shropshire) in 1538 shows this Augustinian house to have been accommodating, besides the canons and their servants, a schoolmaster, three gentlemen and four
gentlemen’s sons. Lilleshall also had nine private chambers listed and seems to have become, in effect, a small boarding school and retirement home.
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Circumstances such as these would be well-known in the neighbourhood. They would not necessarily generate hostility: it could be argued that the religious houses were ‘moving with the times’ in offering a useful service to their local communities, at least to those who could afford it. It is clear, also, that several religious communities continued to be highly valued as sources of relief to the poor. But by the early sixteenth century most members of religious orders did not pretend to be living a life of austerity; this at least was what Benedictine monks told Cardinal Wolsey, the only exceptions in their eyes being the Carthusians, Franciscan Observants and Bridgettines. All this would foster a climate of scepticism about their
raison d’être
and provide the context in which dissolution could be contemplated.
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Arrangements such as those described in the previous paragraph reinforce the point made at the beginning of the chapter that the supposed distinction within the Church between ‘regulars’ living apart from ‘the world’ and ‘seculars’ living as part of it, was easily blurred. This was nowhere more evident than in the phenomenon of the ‘monastic cathedral’, whereby the principal church of a bishop’s diocese also served, and was served by, a monastic community. Such an arrangement was peculiar to England and meant that, of the 17 cathedrals in existence for most of the middle ages, those at Bath, Canterbury (Christ Church), Durham, Ely, Norwich, Rochester, Winchester and Worcester were also the churches of Benedictine monasteries, while that of Carlisle belonged to a house of Augustinian canons. In some cases, these provisions pre-date the Conquest – as at Canterbury, Winchester and Worcester – in others they reflect arrangements made by the incoming Normans: Ely, for example, was raised to cathedral status in 1109, Carlisle in 1133. The bishop was titular abbot, but the administration of the house was effectively in the hands of the prior, hence the designation of these foundations as ‘cathedral priories’. They offered a contrast to the remaining cathedrals, staffed by secular canons in a manner familiar to this day: Chichester, Exeter, Hereford, Lichfield, Lincoln, London, Salisbury and York, to which may be added Wells, a cathedral till 1090 and restored to that status – to accompany Bath in the same diocese – in 1244.

It is questionable whether a lay person, visiting a cathedral as a pilgrim to a shrine, or as a worshipper in the nave hearing services chanted beyond the
pulpitum
(screen), would have noticed much difference between the two.
The ‘secular’ cathedrals were well-endowed with estates and built on a grand scale, like their monastic counterparts, and even the domestic buildings bore certain similarities. Cloisters, for example, were added – for processional and ornamental reasons – to the cathedrals of Salisbury in the 1270s and Lincoln in the 1290s, though some, such as Lichfield and York, never built them. A chapter house was also a necessity, so that the secular canons, led by a dean and his key officers, the precentor, chancellor and treasurer, could meet to conduct business; examples can be seen at Lincoln, Salisbury and York, all dating to the thirteenth century and all of polygonal design. But the life of a secular canon lacked – by definition – the full commonality of his ‘regular’ counterpart, so a communal refectory and communal dormitory were inappropriate: the canons lived instead in separate houses nearby.
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