Late Middle Ages

Daily life in a Benedictine monastery

A monk of the late medieval English Benedictine abbey of Durham rose, on a winter morning in 1380, to the sound of a hand-bell rung by the sacristan at perhaps 1.45 a.m. He made his way, by the light of a wax taper, through the night stair from the dorter (the dormitory) into the south transept of the great church, where the community of sixty or seventy was gathering for the night office of Matins. He was back in his stall for Lauds at first light, for Prime at 6, for Terce at 9, and for the missa conventualis, the conventual Mass, at the third hour; for the capitulum, the daily chapter meeting in which an abbot or prior read from the Rule, the Regula Benedicti of c. 530, and dealt with the negotia of the house; for Sext at noon, for None at three, for Vespers at sunset, and for Compline before the abbot’s blessing and the second night stair. The pattern — eight cursus of psalms, eight hours of prayer, with a single daily Mass — is the same one that a monk of Cluny in 950, a monk of Wearmouth in 700, or a monk of Monte Cassino in 580 would have known. What had changed by 1380 was everything around it: the buildings, the estates, the books, the kitchen, the abbot’s pension, the cellarer’s computus of the grange.

The Rule and the late medieval house

The Rule of St. Benedict — Regula Benedicti, RB, the regula of the Order of St. Benedict and, by adoption, of the Cistercians, the Carthusians, the Cluniacs (with customs), the Camaldolese, the Vallombrosans, and a long list of reformed congregations in the eleventh and twelfth centuries — is the longest-lived and most influential single document of the Western monastic tradition. It is the rule of a man, Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–c. 547), a Romanised Italian aristocrat who left a career at the schools of Rome to live as a hermit at Subiaco, and who set down the rule of a community, the cenobium of Monte Cassino, in a small book of seventy-three short chapters. The RB prescribes a vita of ora et labora — prayer and work — ordered by the laus perennis of the seven horas and the weekly chapter; of stabilitas loci, the vow that binds the monk to a particular house for life; of oboedientia, obedience to the abbot in Christo; and of conversio morum, the conversatio of the Conversi, the monks who live in the world. The proem to the RB (Obsculta, o fili, praecepta magistri, “Listen, child, to the precepts of the master”) has been called the most frequently copied passage of Western monasticism.

The late medieval Benedictine house was, in effect, a small community of clerks in a large secular estate. The magnus abbas of a great English house in 1380 — the abbot of St. Albans, of Glastonbury, of Bury St Edmunds, of Westminster, of Durham — was a mitred lord of Parliament (the Mitred Parliamentary Abbots, twenty-six in number, were the most powerful of the monastic lobby in the upper house of the English parliament from 1340 to 1539). He held a temporality of perhaps three thousand pounds a year, with a hundred and fifty tenants in capite, a pension-list of perhaps a hundred monks in residence, and a camera that was the de facto financial office of the house. The cellarer, who was the senior obedientiary of the community, was the patronus agriculturae of the house: he was responsible for the granges, the herds, the granaries, the rents, the cellaria of wine and ale. The sacrist kept the church, the vestry, the ornaments, the relics, the lights; the kitchener ran the kitchen; the infirmerer ran the infirmary; the almoner the almshouse. The obedientiary system, in which the senior monks were given charge of a particular office and a particular expensa, was the late medieval system of running the house: the Customary of the English Benedictine houses — the Consuetudinarium of St. Augustine’s Canterbury, edited by E. M. Thompson for the Henry Bradshaw Society in 1902, the Customary of the abbey of Bury, and the Regula and the Consuetudines of the Tegernsee and the Cluniac and the Bursfeld congregations — are the working documents of the system. The bibliography is in David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England (2nd ed., 1963), and in the more recent C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages (3rd ed., 2001).

The Opus Dei

The Opus Dei, the work of God, was the heart of the monastic life. The RB prescribes eight cursus — Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline — and the psalterium of 150 psalms to be recited each week. The “Pssalter of Ferial Days” of the medieval English customaries is the standard ordering of the psalms in the late medieval house. The night office of Matins was the longest, of some eighteen psalms and three nocturns, with readings from the Bible (in winter) or from a liber hagiographicus (in summer). The morning office of Lauds was of six psalms and the cantica, the Benedictus, and the Te Deum. Prime, Terce, Sext, and None were the “little hours” of the working day, of three psalms each, with a capitulum and a collect. Vespers was of five psalms and a Magnificat. Compline was the night office of three psalms and the Nunc dimittis. The whole psalter was sung every week; the cantus was Gregorian, with an antiphonale on the choir stalls; and the cantus of the kantor of the capella of the cantor — a small set of rotuli, cantatoriums, and gradualia — was, in many houses, the only formal music.

The late medieval house added to the RB a series of devotional practices that the RB had not provided: the Marian offices of the Salve Regina sung at Compline, the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary (the Officium Parvum Beatae Mariae Virginis) of eight lessons, the Vigils of the Dead sung in the infirmary, the Commemorations of the Saints of the proprium sanctorum, and the Office of the Holy Name of the Devotio Moderna. The Use of the Sarum, the Use of York, and the Use of Hereford are the three main English uses; the Use of Cluny and the Use of Rome are the continental comparanda. The Breviarium of the Sarum was, in the late fifteenth century, the most widely printed book in England. The standard edition is F. Proctor and C. Wordsworth, Breviarium ad Usum Sarum (3 vols, Cambridge, 1879–86). The treatment is in P. F. M. B. Bishop, Liturgica Historica (Oxford, 1918), and in the recent E. C. Whitaker, Documents of the Baptismal Liturgy (rev. ed., 2003).

The cloister and the work

The claustrum, the cloister, was the working space of the monastery. The RB has a celebrated chapter (De operibus manuum) on the labor manuum, the manual work that Benedict prescribed for the monk; the late medieval house combined that labor with the officium of the cantor, the scribe, the teacher, the almoner, and the cellarer. The monk worked in the claustrum: in the south walk, the carrell of the library (a small study with a desk, a scriptorium bench, and a candela); in the east walk, the scriptorium (a long room with desks, a bancus, an armarium of the codices); in the west walk, the vestibulum of the domus; in the north walk, the lavatorium and the coquina. The claustrum was the sancta sancta of the monastic life; the RB forbids all secular work in the claustrum and limits the access of women to the claustrum to a set of carefully defined exceptions. The claustral discipline was the central disciplinary fact of the medieval house.

The labor manuum of the late medieval monk was not the heavy agricultural labour of the early medieval house. The conversi, the lay brothers of the conversorum of the Bursfeld and the Sublacensi congregations, did the bulk of the manual work of the great estates. The monachi in capitulum were occupied with the Opus Dei, the sacra scriptura, the consilium of the abbot, the administration of the estates, the copying of manuscripts, and the hospitium of the guests. The cellerarius ran the granges; the infirmarius ran the infirmaria; the elemosinarius ran the eleemosynaria. The cellaria, the magna cella of the wine, the bracina of the ale, the granarium of the wheat, the stabula of the cattle, were the oeconomia of the camera of the house. The Customary of the abbey of Tegernsee of the eleventh century and the Obedientiary rolls of Durham, edited by Fowler for the Surtees Society in 1902, are the two indispensable working documents.

Reading, the scriptorium, and the library

The lectio divina — the holy reading of the Bible, the church fathers, and the monastic classics — was, with the Opus Dei, the foundation of the vita of the medieval monk. The RB prescribes a lectio continua, a continuous reading, of the Bible; the late medieval lectio was more diversified. The Bible (the Biblia in the monastic armarium of the claustrum) was the main text. The Glossa Ordinaria of Walafrid Strabo (ninth century), the Glossa Lombardi of Peter Lombard (twelfth century), and the Moralia in Job of Gregory the Great (sixth century) were the glossae on the Bible. The Vitas Patrum of Rufinus of Aquileia and of Gregory of Tours, the Dialogues of Gregory, the Institutes and the Conferences of John Cassian, the Scala Claustralium of Guigo II of the Grande Chartreuse (twelfth century), the Speculum Virginum of the twelfth century, the De Laude Novae Militiae of Bernard of Clairvaux (twelfth century), the De Consideratione of Bernard, the De Trinitate of Augustine, the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, the De Proprietatibus Rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus (thirteenth century), and the De Regimine Principum of Egidius Romanus (thirteenth century) were the lectio of the medieval claustrum. The monachi in lectorino read for an hour or two each day; the monachi in studio read the sententiae of the magister of the schola.

The late medieval scriptorium was a serious library. The book of the late medieval house was the codex of the bibliotheca: the Bible, the florilegium, the legendarium of the flos sanctorum, the homiliarium of the homiliae of the church year, the sacramentarium of the baptisterium and the altar, the collectarium of the capitulum, the customary of the congregation. The armarium of the late medieval house held perhaps a hundred to two hundred volumes, of which perhaps a fifth were libri sacri (Bibles, sacramentaries, breviaries) and the rest were the libri scholastici of the school and the libri historici of the chronicle. The catalogue of the library of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, edited by M. R. James for the Cambridge Antiquarian Society in 1895, and the catalogue of the library of the abbey of Durham, edited by B. Mynors, are the two key catalogues. The scriptorium itself was a workshop of copyists, rubricators, illuminators, and binders; the most ambitious late medieval scriptorium, that of the abbey of Conques in southern France and of the Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence, produced codices of considerable artistic merit. The treatment is in R. G. Calkins, Medieval Books in a Modern World (Eerdmans, 2007), and in the older J. A. Symonds, The Revival of Learning (rev. ed., 1910).

Discipline, the abbot, and resistance

The RB is, on the face of it, a regula of strict discipline. The abbot is the vicarius Christi in the claustrum; he is bound to keep the RB, to be the paterfamilias of the domus, to consult the seniores of the capitulum and the decretum of the congregatio in the major affairs of the domus. The capitulum is the forum of the disciplina: the culpae (the daily chapter, the morning capitulum after Prime) hears the culpae (the faults) of the monks, imposes the paenitentia of the RB, and reads the martyrologium and the necrologium of the commemoratio of the fratres defuncti. The culpae of the capitulum were: silentium (the silentium of the claustrum, broken for the collatio of the evening reading); the mensa (the mensa of the refectorium, read by the lector of the mensa, with a signum of a hand-bell at the cena); the lectio of the ora; the vestitus of the habitus (the black cowl, the cuculla of the choir, the scapular of the work, the tunica of the dormitorium); the porta (the porta of the claustrum, the claustra of the claustrales); the thesaurus (the private proprietas forbidden by the RB); the votum (the castitas of the conversio); the locus (the stabilitas loci of the conversus).

The late medieval vita of the claustrum was, in the cities, more lax than the RB prescribed. The great abbacies were pensioneries of absentee abbots; the conversi were the working force; the monachi in studio were the lawyers of the abbot’s courts. The resistance of the claustrales to the disciplina of the abbot is one of the great themes of the late medieval house. The Monks of Durham of the late fifteenth century (ed. J. Raine, Surtees Society, 1835; the Rites of Durham of the 1590s) record, in the Liber Vitae of the claustro, a complex negotiation of consuetudo and capitulum — a world in which the cameral account of the camera and the psalmorum account of the chorus were the two negotia of the house. The standard treatment is in the great B. H. Rosenwein and T. Head, The Abbey of Cluny in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2001), and in the older but still valuable C. H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Harvard, 1927). The treatment of the late medieval claustrum is in C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism (3rd ed., 2001), and in Barber, The Two Cities: Medieval Europe 1050–1320 (Routledge, 2005).

A short reading list

The Regula Benedicti is best read in Benedict of Nursia, The Rule of Saint Benedict, trans. A. C. Meisel and M. L. del Mastro (Doubleday, 1975), or, for the Latinist, in the critical edition of J. Neufville and A. de Vogüé, La Règle de Saint Benoît (Sources Chrétiennes 181–86, 1971–72). On the late medieval house in England, David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England (2nd ed., Cambridge, 1963), is still the first work to read; for the Continent, C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism (3rd ed., 2001). On the consuetudines, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica series Consuetudines Monasticae (vols. 1–5, ed. K. Hallinger, 1963–84). On the Opus Dei, P. F. M. B. Bishop, Liturgica Historica (Oxford, 1918). The wider context is in The mendicant orders: Franciscans and Dominicans and in The late medieval decline of monastic life; for the institutional backdrop, see the overview of monasticism in the late Middle Ages and the overview of the late medieval church.

References and further reading

  • C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages (3rd ed., Longman, 2001).
  • David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England: A History of its Development from the Times of St. Augustine to the Dissolution of the Monasteries (2nd ed., Cambridge, 1963).
  • Kassius Hallinger (ed.), Consuetudines Monasticae (5 vols, MGH, 1963–84).
  • Jean de Viguerie (ed.), Les Monastères Bénédictins (Perrin, 2008).
  • The Monks of Durham, The Rites of Durham, ed. J. T. Fowler (Surtees Society, 1903).
  • Terence G. Kardong, The Life of St. Benedict by Gregory the Great: Translation and Commentary (Liturgical Press, 2009).