Late Middle Ages

The late medieval decline of monastic life

The long fifteenth century saw a slow but unmistakable decline in the older monastic orders. The great Benedictine and Cistercian houses of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the great Cluniac priories, the cathedral chapters of the Augustinian canons, were by 1500 in most parts of western Christendom smaller, poorer, and less disciplined than they had been at the high point of the monastic expansion. The mendicant friars had taken over the apostolic functions of the parish; the cursus honorum of the secular clergy had taken over the administration of the dioceses; the universities had taken over the formation of the theologians. The reformed communities of the late medieval period — the Bursfeld and Melk congregations of the Benedictines, the Windesheim canons of the Augustinians, the Brethren of the Common Life of the Devotio Moderna — were the principal response of the institutional church to the lamentatio, and they are the principal subject of the present article.

The historiography is more complicated than it looks. The older Reformist narrative, which treated the late medieval monastery as a den of ignorance, vice, and wealth, and the Reformation as the necessary correction, has been dead for a generation. The narrative that has replaced it — the work of David Knowles, of C. H. Lawrence, of Barber, of Frans van Liere, and of John Van Engen — is more careful. The demographic and economic decline of the older orders was real, but the spiritual and intellectual life of the reformed communities was a real and significant response. The “decline” of the title, in other words, is the title of an old literary topos of the reformatio; the institutional reality is the more complex. The following sections lay out the demographic, the economic, the disciplinary, and the cultural story in turn, before turning to the dissolution of the sixteenth century.

The demographic curve

The demographic decline of the older orders was a long, slow, uneven process. The peak of monastic expansion in the West was the late twelfth and the early thirteenth century: the Cluniac houses numbered perhaps 1,100 by 1100 and the Cistercian houses some 700 by 1200. The number of monachi in the great English Benedictine houses — Evesham, Canterbury, St. Albans, Glastonbury, Bury St Edmunds, Westminster, Durham — was perhaps 200 to 250 in the early thirteenth century; by 1380, the average was well below 100, and a number of the smaller houses had a convent of fewer than ten. The Cistercian houses had a similar trajectory, and the Cluniac priories of England — the English dependencies of Cluny — were reduced in many cases to a handful of monachi and a prior claustralis. The Continental pattern was similar: the great Cluniac house of Cluny itself had perhaps 300 monks in 1300 and fewer than 100 in 1400. The Black Death of 1347–49, the successive plagues of 1361–62, 1369, 1375, and 1380–81, the pestis secunda of 1399 and the recurrences down to 1485, accelerated the decline. The population of England in 1450 was perhaps half that of 1300; the population of the monasteries was, in many places, a smaller fraction of that.

The economic correlate of the demographic decline was the consolidation of the monastic estates. The great abbey of Bury St Edmunds, which in 1300 had perhaps 200 monks and a temporal income of £1,200, had by 1380 perhaps 60 monks and an income of £1,500; the average monastic income per monk had more than doubled. The congregatio of the conversi, the lay brothers of the late medieval house, declined with the rest; the conversus of the early medieval house, who was the working force of the granges, was replaced in many houses by famuli, hired lay workers, and ballivii, secular bailiffs. The camera of the abbot, the domus of the cellarer, the eleemosynaria of the almoner, were the working institutions of the late medieval oeconomia. The records of the cartae of the great English houses, edited in the Calendar of Patent Rolls and the Calendar of Close Rolls of the Public Record Office, are the principal documentary base.

Discipline and the lamentatio

The disciplinary decline of the older orders is harder to document. The lamentationes of the capitula of the late medieval provincial councils — the lamentationes of the Council of London of 1342, of the Council of Reims of 1408, of the Council of the Lateran of 1512 — are the obvious source, and they are a literary genre. The lamentatio is the topos of the reformatio; it is present in the Liber de reformatione of the Cistercian abbot Peter of Tarentaise (the future Innocent V, d. 1276), in the Tractatus de reformatione of the Benedictine abbot of Melk, and in the De ruina of the Cistercian abbot of Heiligenkreuz. The topos is, in itself, a piece of evidence: it tells us what the reformers thought was wrong. The reforms of the late medieval period — the congregationes of the Bursfeld (founded 1430), the Melk (founded 1450s), the Vallombrosa (founded 1039), the Camaldoli of the eleventh century, the Carthusians of the Grande Chartreuse (founded 1084) — were the practical responses to the lamentatio. The Bursfeld congregation, founded at the Münsterschwarzach and the Bursfeld in 1430 by the abbot of Bursfeld, was the most successful of the German reform congregations; the Windesheim congregation of canons, founded 1387 in the Windesheim priory of the Augustinian canons, was the most successful of the Northern; the congregationes of the Celestines (founded 1294), the Olivetan (founded 1313), and the Cassinese (founded 1408) of the Italian south were the most successful of the Italian. The standard work on the congregationes of the fifteenth century is Franz Xaver Kroener, Die Bursfelder Kongregation (Paderborn, 1981); on the Windesheim congregation, E. W. F. Tomberg, Die Devotio Moderna und die niederländische Literatur des späten Mittelalters (Düsseldorf, 1963).

The Devotio Moderna and the Brethren of the Common Life

The most influential of the late medieval reform movements was the Devotio Moderna, the devotio that began in the IJssel valley of the Low Countries in the 1370s and 1380s and produced, in the Brethren of the Common Life and the Sisters of the Common Life, the congregationes of the canonici saeculares and the sorores who were the educational and pastoral avant-garde of the late medieval church. The movement was founded by Geert Groote (Gerardus Magnus, 1340–1384), a deacon of Deventer, who was converted by the mystica theologia of the moderni and especially by the Devotio of Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–1381), the prior of Groenendaal. Groote was a popular preacher, a friend of the great schoolmen of the Rhineland, and a master of the ars moriendi of the late medieval pastoral; the Devotio is the practical philosophy of a man who thought that the older forms of monastic life had become impossible and that the imitatio Christi required a new vita. Groote died in 1384; the Brethren of the Common Life were founded in his house at Deventer by Florens Radewijns (1350–1400) in 1381, and the Sisters by the sisters of the Master Geert’s communitates in 1374; the Windesheim canons of the Augustinian order, the congregatio of the reformatio, were founded in 1387.

The two most influential products of the Devotio were the Imitatio Christi of Thomas à Kempis (Thomas Hemerken, c. 1380–1471), a copyist of the Brethren in the Agnietenberg priory near Zwolle, and the schools of the Brethren in Deventer, Zwolle, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Brussels, and a hundred other towns of the Low Countries and the Rhineland. The Imitatio, a short treatise of four books in the form of a dialogue between the Devotus and Christ, was the most widely read book of the late Middle Ages, after the Bible: the number of surviving manuscripts of the Imitatio runs into the thousands, in Latin, in French, in German, in English, in Italian, in Spanish, in Czech. The schools of the Brethren were the educational model of the northern European Renaissance: the school of Deventer educated Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), and the school of ‘s-Hertogenbosch educated the humanist scholars of the devotio school. The treatment is in John Van Engen, Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings (Classics of Western Spirituality, 1988), and in the older but still valuable Albert Hyma, The Brethren of the Common Life (Grand Rapids, 1950).

Reform, dissolution, and afterlife

The dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century was the consequence of two long processes. The first was the secular. The monastic estates of England — perhaps a quarter of the cultivated land of the kingdom — were the target of the Crown from the reign of Henry VII. The Statute of 1536 (Act for the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries) and the Statute of 1539 (Act for the Dissolution of the Greater Monasteries) were the legislative instruments of Thomas Cromwell, the Vicar General, and the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535 was the financial instrument. The smaller monasteries, with a clear annual income of less than £200, were dissolved in 1536–37; the greater, including St. Albans, Glastonbury, Bury St Edmunds, and Westminster, in 1539–40. The pension for the displaced monks was, in general, generous; the monastic libraries were, in the famous phrase of John Leland, “defaced and mangled” by the commissioners; the bona monastica of the estates, the lead of the roofs, the timber of the dorter, the capellae of the church, were sold for the use of the king’s privy purse. The process is the subject of G. W. O. Woodward, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (1966), and of the older D. Knowles, The Religious Orders in England (3 vols, Cambridge, 1948–59).

The second was the religious. The Continental Reformations were the long-term consequence of the lamentatio of the late medieval church, and the dissolution of the older orders in the Lutheran, Reformed, and Radical Reformation states — the Aufhebung der Klöster of the Reichskreis in the 1520s, the suppression of the orders in Zürich, in Geneva, in Strasbourg, in Basel, in the Scandinavian kingdoms, in the Netherlands, in the Palatinate — was the political consequence. The Catholic Reformation, the Reformatio Catholica, of the Council of Trent (1545–1563) and the Institute of the Society of Jesus of Ignatius of Loyola (approved 1540) was the response. The Jesuit collegium, the seminarium, the exercitia spiritualia of Loyola, the Ratio Studiorum of 1599 — these were the institutional forms of the post-Tridentine church. The older orders — the Benedictines of the Cassinese and the Bursfeld congregations, the Franciscans of the conventuales and the observantines, the Dominicans of the provinciae of the new Catholic world — were reformed on the pattern of the Trentine visitatio and the capitulum. The history is in O. Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford, 1981), and in the older H. O. Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (Cambridge, 1968).

A short reading list

The two indispensable modern works are C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism (3rd ed., 2001), and David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England (2nd ed., 1963). On the Devotio Moderna, John Van Engen, Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings (Classics of Western Spirituality, 1988). On the dissolution, G. W. O. Woodward, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (1966), and Joyce Youings, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (1971). On the Benedictine congregationes, the older J. M. Ploeger, De hervormingskringen in de Nederlandse en Duitse landen (Assen, 1966). For the long aftermath, Barber, The Two Cities: Medieval Europe 1050–1320 (2005), and R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (1989). The treatment of the vita in the claustrum is in Daily life in a Benedictine monastery; the apostolic alternative is in The mendicant orders: Franciscans and Dominicans; the wider heretical context is in Heresy, dissent, and reform.

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 Religious Orders in England (3 vols, Cambridge, 1948–59).
  • John Van Engen (ed.), Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings (Paulist Press, 1988).
  • Joyce Youings, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (Allen & Unwin, 1971).
  • Franz Xaver Kroener, Die Bursfelder Kongregation (Schöningh, 1981).
  • R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Blackwell, 1989).