by C. B. Hanley
The Cistercian Order was prosperous, with its wealth based primarily on the wool trade and supported by donations from wealthy patrons concerned with the state of their souls. One of these was Earl William de Warenne, who in the early thirteenth century gave Roche a grant of fish from his manors; the words which Brother William writes down at the beginning of this book are quoted directly from the earl’s original letter.
The Order held a General Chapter for all heads of houses at its birthplace of Citeaux (in France) in mid-September each year, and all abbots were required to attend. The abbots from the north of England were slightly unfortunate in this respect: their colleagues in Scotland and Ireland had dispensation to attend only once every four years, due to the distance they had to travel, but this was not extended to even the furthest-flung parts of England. Thus the abbot of Roche – together with the companion he was allowed to bring with him – would have to undertake the month-long journey every year, leaving his flock in the hands of his deputy.
As depicted here, the monastic community both at Roche and in other houses was divided into two unequal parts: the choir monks and the lay brothers. The choir monks were generally from noble or knightly families, and they would make a donation to the Order before they could join. They undertook all three parts of the order’s duties: the cycle of canonical hours, theological study known as lectio divina, and manual labour. Naturally the number of hours each monk spent in church or in study every day meant that he had less time for manual labour, so the lay brothers did more of this, including not only fieldwork but also everything else which the community needed to be self-sufficient: they were blacksmiths, bakers, masons, shepherds, tanners, millers, and so on. The lay brothers were generally from peasant families but a few among them were nobles who chose to enter the Order at this level in order to demonstrate humility. They attended only morning and evening services and spent the rest of each day at their work, but they still had to take the same vows of poverty, chastity and obedience as the choir monks.
The plan of Roche Abbey which appears at the beginning of this book is based on what the abbey would have looked like in 1217. It differs slightly from those you will see now at the site or in guidebooks, as more buildings were added later in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries which Edwin would not have encountered. Like all Cistercian monasteries, Roche had a well-stocked library of dozens of volumes; we do not have a full inventory from the early thirteenth century but some of its books survive to this day, including the writings of Augustine of Hippo and Gregory the Great, and we do know that all Cistercian monasteries of this period had copies of the Carta Caritatis and the writings of one of the great Cistercians, Aelred of Rievaulx.
Roche Abbey was destroyed in the Dissolution during the sixteenth century, bringing an end to four hundred years of continuous worship and monastic life on the site. The remaining monks were dispersed, the abbey buildings destroyed, the lead from the roof melted, the timbers ripped out, the tombs broken and defaced. The only pieces of the abbey left standing now are the gatehouse and a small part of the church, but careful excavations have revealed the most complete ground plan of any Cistercian monastery in England, and you can walk around it, in and out of the doorways and into each ‘room’, today. The beautiful abbey grounds were later landscaped by Capability Brown, and the site is now a peaceful spot for quiet reflection or for a visit and picnic.
Although the Cistercian Order as a whole was wealthy, individual Cistercian monks were allowed no money or personal possessions. The Order interpreted the Rule of St Benedict more strictly than the Benedictines, and their churches contained no gold, jewels or silks; their abbots, priors and monks wore no costly garments or ornaments. The daily lives of the choir monks were strictly regulated and divided into the three parts detailed above, with all having to undertake all duties including manual labour, although the old and the young were given work more appropriate to their strength and physical capabilities. The day ran from sunrise to sunset, divided at all times of year into twelve ‘hours’ which were therefore much longer in the summer than they were in the winter. Sext, ‘the sixth hour’, was at noon, with the morning and afternoon subdivided by terce, ‘the third hour’, and nones, ‘the ninth hour’. The monks also attended the services of prime (‘the first hour’) in the morning, and vespers and compline in the evening. The twelve hours of darkness were broken for all except the novices by the night services of matins and lauds, so sleep deprivation must have been constant.
For most of the year the monks ate only once per day, in the late morning, but in the summer months they also had an evening meal to help sustain them through the longer days. Meat was strictly forbidden for all but the sick, so the principal foodstuffs were bread, pulses and vegetables, with some dairy produce or fish added on special occasions. Silence was observed throughout the monastery except in the monks’ parlour and the lay brothers’ parlour, and a form of sign language developed which helped the monks communicate on day-to-day matters.
The daily life of the monks and lay brothers, including their food and clothing, their duties, and the timings of church services, Chapter, meals, reading and labour, was more or less as I have described here. Abbeys also allowed (male) guests to stay within their outer walls, and had a dedicated guesthouse and guestmaster for that purpose. I have made two specific changes to abbey life in order to suit my plot points. The first is that the Order was even stricter about the presence of women than I have depicted here – not only were they not permitted to enter the abbey proper, they were not even allowed in the main church except on feast days (and even then not if they were breastfeeding) – so Edwin would not have seen Anabilia at a regular vespers service. The second is that, although I needed them to have their hoods up, when undertaking the lectio divina the monks actually sat with their hoods down, to make sure they were not making up for their lack of sleep with a quick nap!
Anchorites – or anchoresses, if they were women – did exist at this time. They took rather more extreme vows than other members of religious orders and spent their lives in complete solitude, often in cells adjoining churches or chapels. They underwent a funeral ceremony as they were sealed in, to demonstrate that they were now dead to the world. However, they did this on a voluntary basis, and as far as I am aware enforced vocation was not used as a punishment. However, the casting out of a monk from a house or from an Order was a penalty for those who had committed very grave sins (members of religious orders were not subject to lay justice, meaning they could not be tried in a king’s court and could not be sentenced to death). The words which Prior Henry uses in the epilogue here are taken directly from the Rule of St Benedict on that subject.
The abbot of Roche Abbey in 1217 was Reginald, who had been in post for four years after the long and successful abbacy of Osmund (c.1184–1213) under whose leadership the abbey had expanded and prospered. Henry, Helias, Durand, Richard, Jordan, Walter, Eugenius, Amandus, Thurstan, Waldef and Sinnulph are all names of monks or lay brothers who were associated with the Cistercian Order in Yorkshire during the Middle Ages, though not all at Roche and not all at the same time. Of most of them we know only their names, though we do have small details about some of the Roche men: Prior Henry was later to be abbot of Roche’s mother house at Newminster in Northumberland, and Brother Richard became abbot of Roche in 1229. Brother Helias, Roche’s cellarer, was ‘a man full of energy, fully practised in dealing with outside affairs’, who later became abbot of Kirkstall. In the later thirteenth century there was a female hermit named Anabilia who lived in the woods and who had a corrody of five monastery loaves and three gallons of ale per week; she evidently lived longer than expected, as she sued the abbey for withdrawing the corrody which she claimed had been granted for life. Brothers William, Guy, Godfrey and Octavian, Benedict and the other novices, and the abbey guests Aylwin and Sir Philip are entirely fictional, as are Edwin and Martin.
The character of Brother Alexander is based very loosely on Alexander of Neckham, a
real person who lived from 1157 to 1217, though there is no indication that his death in that year was due to murder. He was actually an Augustinian monk, but I became so interested in his writings that I gave in to temptation and placed him in the Cistercian abbey of Roche following his travels. He was the author of the De naturis rerum, a compendium of the scientific knowledge of the twelfth century, and was the first European author to mention the use of a magnetised needle as a guide to sailors. He had completed volume one of his Speculum Speculationum and was working on volume two at the time of his death.
Prior to his return to England Alexander had travelled widely in Europe and may well have encountered the famous intellectual Daniel of Morley (died 1210). A native of Norfolk, Daniel initially travelled to Paris, a great centre of learning, but was unimpressed with the masters there and so went to Toledo to study with Arab masters – something which certainly enlarged his learning but which did not meet with the approval of all Christian churchmen. He returned to England sometime around 1186 with a collection of books, which is what gave me the idea of having my fictional Alexander also bringing back a precious volume.
The book which I have written about here as the cause of all the trouble is fictional, but it does bear some resemblance to the celebrated Maciejowski Bible (also sometimes known as the Morgan Bible as it is now in the Pierpoint Morgan Library in New York; MS M.638). This volume is one of the most astonishing artistic achievements of the thirteenth century, depicting the Old Testament from the Creation to the story of David in ninety-two brilliantly illustrated pages; it would certainly have been an incredible sight for any normal medieval person, never mind for a scholar who could interpret it as well as being moved by the quality of the pictures. Throughout its life this Bible has journeyed through many countries, and the pages contain annotations from different centuries written in Persian and Arabic as well as Latin. The entire work is available to view on the Morgan Library’s website; if you think the Middle Ages were dull and mud-coloured, take a look at this manuscript and think again.
To our somewhat jaded modern sensibilities it may be difficult to understand just how strange and frightening some phenomena were to medieval people who had no way to explain them. Think about it: if you had never in your life seen a pair of identical twins, and you had no idea that they existed, how would you react? Twins were not unheard of in the thirteenth century, but they were certainly much more of a rarity than they are now. The rates of conception of twins were probably similar to those of the 1970s (before modern fertility treatments became available), but very few of them survived. A woman pregnant with twins was more likely to suffer complications resulting in miscarriage; and bearing in mind that approximately one in six of all newborns died at birth or shortly afterwards, we can extrapolate that mortality rates among twins were even higher given that they were generally smaller than singleton babies and were liable to be born earlier. Even riches and the best medical care available at the time could not save most of them: Prince Louis, heir to the French throne and the man holding much of England in 1217, was both the brother and the father of twins, but all four babies died at birth. Thus it is entirely plausible that a less-travelled man such as Edwin has never seen an adult pair of twins at all – never mind an identical pair – and that he is unfamiliar with the concept.
Other seemingly inexplicable phenomena were also attributed to divine intervention. It was believed, for example, that a corpse would bleed in the presence of its murderer, and that the saints had intercessory powers of healing. The descriptions in this book of Brother Richard and his sufferings are based on a real case reported in 1172 where one Gaufrid had three teeth extracted and then ate too much supper, resulting in a horrendous reaction:
His whole head swelled so much that he presented the appearance not of a man but of some portentous and horrid monster: his skin was stretched like a bladder so that those who saw him wondered that it did not break. The prominence of his nose was reduced to flatness; the eyes were sunken and dimmed; the mouth closed by the swelling of the lips and the power of breathing obstructed. His friends inserted a reed into his mouth to enable him to breathe.
(From The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth)
Gaufrid, a native of Norwich who was at that time in Canterbury, was taken to the tomb of the recently martyred St Thomas Becket; prayers were said to St William of Norwich, and candles put all about the sick man’s head, after which: ‘on the left side of the throat the skin cracked and burst as if pricked by an awl, and a great discharge came out. The swelling subsided with extraordinary quickness; the pain departed and the sick man recovered.’ Modern research has put the swelling down to post-operative infection causing the formation of a massive abscess which subsequently burst, possibly related to the heating of the skin, but Edwin would have had no way of knowing this as he watched events unfold, so it would be natural for him and for others to put it down to divine intervention. There is, incidentally, plenty of further reading available on medieval dentistry, but it is not for the faint-hearted.
Also not for the faint-hearted was the ongoing war in England, although the common people could not escape it and had no choice but to live with the consequences if it came near them. Some lands, particularly those in the south and east of England, were fought over time and time again, the inhabitants pillaged, murdered or tortured for their money and goods. The abbey of St Albans was looted several times by men of both sides. Louis’s quest for the English crown had stalled a little after the defeat of his forces at Lincoln, but his wife had been active on his behalf and in the summer of 1217 she was building and equipping a huge fleet of reinforcements on the other side of the Channel. William Marshal, the regent acting on behalf of the boy king Henry III, gathered an armed force to try to prevent the landing of this fleet, and it is towards this muster that Edwin is about to ride …
Further Reading
The Cistercians in Yorkshire online research project, http://cistercians.shef.ac.uk/index.php
The Rule of St Benedict, trans. Abbott Parry OSB (Leominster: Gracewing, 1990)
Birkedal Bruun, Mette (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Burton, Janet, and Julie Kerr, The Cistercians in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011)
Lloyd, T.H., The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)
Moorman, John, Church Life in England in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945)
About the Author
C.B. HANLEY has a PhD in mediaeval studies from the University of Sheffield and is the author of War and Combat 1150–1270: The Evidence from Old French Literature and Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England, as well as her Mediaeval Mystery series, The Sins of the Father, The Bloody City and Whited Sepulchres. She currently writes a number of scholarly articles on the period, as well as teaching on writing for academic publication, and also works as a copy-editor and proofreader.
Copyright
First published in 2016
The Mystery Press, an imprint of The History Press
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