It was not only upon the valley floor that the work of land reclamation went on. Along the lower slopes of the hills the woodlands were cleared and more fertile fields created. Thus in the days of Ambrosius an Iron Age man looking down into the valley from his old hilltop eyries would have seen a fertile garden in place of the wilderness of marsh and mere and forest. He would have seen rich pastures, some dotted with flocks and herds and others ripening to haysel; fields of standing corn rippling like wind-dappled water when a light breeze brushed the heavy ears; orchards heavy with fruit, and, along the sheltered southward facing slopes of Emberley, vineyards. But what would first catch and hold his eye would be the Abbey itself which had been the cause of this transformation and the heart of all its activity.
In imagination we can reconstruct with fair accuracy the Abbey as it was in the lifetime of Ambrosius. Its foundations were plotted by members of the Midshire Archaeological Society before the site was finally built over, and an admirable plan appears in their Transactions. Moreover, under Cistercian rule, the disposition of the various monastic buildings in relation to the church was almost invariably the same. Only the menial buildings, in other words those wholly connected with the practical and lay activities of the community, were arranged according to local convenience. The heart of the Abbey was, of course, the great church whose scale was such that it would seem to brood over all other buildings like a hen over a clutch of day-old chicks. Like the rest of the monastery it was built by the community, using local stone which they obtained from two quarries not far from the site; one on the eastern flank of Summersend Hill and the other further down the valley in the direction of Westerport. Stone from the Summersend quarry was in all probability floated down the Wendle on rafts whenever a freshet provided sufficient depth. Stone from downstream was brought up to St. John’s Wharf on the tides by the small, shallow draft barges or ‘snakers’, which were the descendants of the long boats of the Vikings.
The nobility and calm majesty of Tintern and Fountains abides with them even in their ruin. Seeing them we realize with how perfect a fitness and beauty this Abbey church of Winterstoke must have crowned its setting of winding river, verdant fields and wooded hills. It was a symbol in stone of the fruitful partnership between God, man and nature which had been made manifest in ripening wheat and laden vine. Despite the immense scale of aisled nave, choir and transepts, the eye was neither overwhelmed by sheer size nor wearied or distracted by any elaboration of detail decoration. The Cistercians deliberately eschewed such decoration so that the beauty of Winterstoke lay in its simplicity and in a perfection of line and proportion which has never been surpassed in Early English architecture.
On the south side of the Abbey nave was the Great Cloister which was enclosed by the following buildings: on the west the dormitory of the conversi or lay brethren was built over a long range of cellars and storehouses; on the south was the refectory flanked by kitchen and buttery. Its length extended from north to south and at its entrance from the cloister was the lavabo. On the east side were ranged the parlour, where lay business was transacted and the rule of silence relaxed; the calefactory or day room, a chamber having hot flues under the floor where the brothers could warm themselves after night offices, and the Chapter House. Over this eastern range of buildings was the monks’ dormitory from which the night stairs gave direct access to the south transept of the Abbey Church. Beside the Chapter House ran a vaulted passage which led to the Library and Little Cloister with its cells for study. Here it was that the monk Ambrosius laboured so diligently. The water supply and drainage of the domestic buildings was provided by leats taken from the Winterstoke brook which flowed through the kitchen, the lavabo, and the necessariums adjoining the two dormitories.
Besides this main block there were a great number of detached buildings, most of them ranged about what was called the Base Court. The largest of these was the infirmary and, most probably, the Abbot’s Lodging in the time of Ambrosius. Many other smaller buildings could not be precisely identified by the antiquaries but were obviously connected with the manifold secular activities of a completely self-supporting community; stables and lodgings for labourers; brewery, winepress and stillroom: granary, slaughter house and farmery; workshops of carpenters, stonemasons, smiths, weavers and curriers. Where a monastery has not, as in this case, completely disappeared, it is usually the sacred buildings which survive because of their sheer size and because they were not readily adaptable to serve any other purpose than that for which they were built. Consequently, seeing only the ruins of church or cloister we tend to underestimate the extent, the diversity and the importance of the secular activities of the great monastic houses, particularly those of the Cistercians. Some of us are inclined to look upon a monastery as the human equivalent of a beehive with the Abbot and his monks, ostensibly devoting themselves to prayer and contemplation but in reality living off the fat of the land, representing the queen bee and the drones, while secular activities consisted simply of servile workers slaving solely to support this idle elite. In fact the monastic system was far more complex than this, nor was there any such arbitrary dichotomy between sacred and secular activity. It was a hierarchical organization which attempted to express in temporal and finite terms the medieval conception of an eternal order in which God, man and nature were interfused in a hierarchy of infinite degree. The sacred, represented by the great church and, in human terms, by the Abbot and his monks, was certainly the apex of this organization, but between them and the meanest and most mundane activity of the community no gulf was fixed. There were no broken rungs in the ladder which led from the Abbot through the monks and the conversi down to the humblest of lay labourers.
In its sacred activities the Abbey of Winterstoke represented not only the faith of Christendom but the storehouse of a European tradition of wisdom and learning which the church had nursed through the dark ages. It was by virtue of this heritage that the Abbey became, in its secular capacity, the mother of all our institutions and our crafts. The conception of our schools, our hospitals, our agricultural methods and the majority of our crafts and trades can all be traced back to this most fertile monastic womb. In agriculture the Cistercians were the pioneers of rotational cropping while their improved methods of stock breeding and raising laid the foundation of England’s first source of mercantile wealth—her wool trade. But the monks of Winterstoke also brought to birth a later and much greater source of wealth. Even the wisest among them could never have foreseen that the first small iron smelting bloomeries which they set up beside the Wendle would one day grow into so prodigious a giant.
The improvements and innovations for which the Cistercians were responsible did not only benefit the monastic community and their lay brethren. The Abbey acted as an agricultural and technical college to the increasing number of lay labourers who were drawn into the prosperous orbit of its many-sided activities. In the neighbourhood of the little church of St. Cenodoc between the Abbey and St. John’s Bridge a village community established itself. In return for their services to the Abbey in craft or agriculture, these peasant cottagers were allotted grazing rights and cultivated strips on certain of the improved lands which thus became the common fields of the village.
The ultimate downfall of the Abbey of Winterstoke was a tragedy brought about by its own success. Not only did the prosperity of the Abbey itself prove too great a temptation to its all too human and fallible community, causing them gradually to relax their early rule of poverty, but the Abbey’s children, the crafts and the laymen who practised them, grew too strong for their mother. They ‘came of age’, demanded freedom and chafed against the discipline and control of a parent who had grown lax in her old age. Even in the lifetime of Ambrosius this weakness, these stresses and strains, were beginning to appear in the fabric of monastic life, but about the time of his death they were greatly aggravated by the tragic visitation of the Black Death.
During the two years, 1348–49, that this frightful s
courge raged in England it is estimated that more than half the population of the Winterstoke area died. The immediate effect of this disaster was to impoverish both the Abbey and the lay community of the village. Within the great church the sonorous cadences of Gregorian chant sounded less strongly and so symbolized the life which had ebbed away to leave fields untilled and crafts languishing for lack of labour. This critical situation enforced changes which had a far-reaching effect upon the whole monastic economy.
Hitherto the great majority of those who worked on the monastic estate had done so upon what we would now call a part-time basis. For the rest of the time they laboured on their own lands which had been allotted to them in return for these services to the Abbey. Some modern historians still hold the view that this system of land tenure was a form of slavery and that when the peasant either avoided these due services by paying rent for his land, or insisted upon monetary payment for work done, he made a vital step towards freedom. No doubt, like every form of human contract, the old system of ‘boon work’ was open to abuse, but when we compare the profoundly unstable value of money with the absolute and unshakeable value of land, the contract appears less one-sided.
As the village community prospered so they became increasingly reluctant to carry out their prescribed services on the monastic demesne. They were doing well and so preferred to work full time on their own account, and pay the fines levied from them for their failure to fulfil their contract. Although in effect these fines were a form of rent, until the Black Death struck they were not officially recognized as such at Winterstoke where Cistercian rule forbade the taking of rent. They were still a payment in default of services due and not a land rent. But after the plague had passed the surviving villagers found themselves in so strong a position that for a time they were able to impose their own conditions on their monastic parents. They contracted with the Abbey to take up on payment of rent the strips in the common fields which had fallen vacant owing to the death of their fellows. Deprived almost entirely of the customary services of its landed tenants, the Abbey demesne now faced an acute labour shortage. Some of the Abbey workshops were leased to craftsmen, others were eventually manned by the landless labourers who, taking advantage of this nation-wide situation, had defied the law which had hitherto bound them adscripti glebæ to their home manors, and roamed the country to sell their services to the highest bidder. Yet despite this influx the labour shortage remained, nor were the new tenant farmers able to take up all the neglected fields. To meet this situation a considerable acreage of the Abbey lands was laid down to permanent pasture and devoted exclusively to sheep raising. Like their sister communities elsewhere, the Cistercians of Winterstoke thus became great flockmasters. It is one of the ironies of history that both the factors which caused the downfall of the Abbey, the breaking away of its lay children and great material wealth, should have stemmed from the impoverishment caused by the Black Death and the steps taken to meet that crisis. For although it took much less labour to shepherd sheep than to till the fields, wool was at this period by far the most profitable commodity in England. Whereas in earlier days the English had been a self-sufficient island race whose exports were negligible and whose imports were confined to the luxuries enjoyed by the court and the nobility, the wool trade fathered a new race of merchant princes who made the English a force to be reckoned with in the markets of Europe. The trade had developed long before the Black Death, but after 1350 it expanded rapidly, and whereas in its first phase exports had consisted almost exclusively of raw wool destined to be woven on Flemish and Italian looms, now, more and more, England exported the finished cloth. A certain amount of cloth was manufactured at Winterstoke, and a fulling mill was built on the Winterstoke brook. But most of the local wool crop was exported in the raw state either by water to Westerport or by pack-horse to Coltisham and Church Ambling, both townships having become important centres of the cloth trade.
The effect of this mercantile prosperity upon the Abbey of Winterstoke is graphically illustrated by the changes which took place during the long reign of Abbot Thomas Luttrell which occupied the middle years of the fifteenth century. In the figure of Thomas Luttrell we see how far the community of Winterstoke had strayed from the rule of poverty, humility and industry which its enlightened founders had so steadfastly followed. For this proud spiritual lord wielded as much power and commanded as much wealth as the greatest of the medieval nobility. Like them he lived and moved with great pomp and circumstance. With the fourteenth-century drift of the wealth of the woollen trade away from East Anglia into the West Country and the south-west Midlands, Winterstoke Abbey had become a favoured port of call for the rich merchants of the Staple and other influential travellers. Thomas Luttrell decided that his predecessors’ modest quarters in the infirmary range were no longer fit for the reception and entertainment of such distinguished company. So the old lodging became, in all probability, an additional Guest House, while Abbot Luttrell built for himself, a little to the west of the Abbey and on slightly higher ground, a magnificent new house. With its spacious apartments, its immense kitchen of the cavernous ovens and hearths and, above all, its great pillared hall, 150 feet long by 50 feet wide, aside from the castles of a few great nobles, no subject in England was more sumptuously housed than Abbot Thomas. Only his brother Abbot of Fountains in the North could boast a larger hall.
In justice it must be said that the material wealth of the Abbey was by no means wholly devoted to the comfort of the Abbot and his guests. The monastic buildings were considerably enlarged, enriched and beautified during Luttrell’s reign at Winterstoke. It was he who initiated the building of the beautiful perpendicular tower, which is referred to in the contemporary records as the ‘great tower’ or the ‘Luttrell Tower’, and which was not finally completed until shortly before the dissolution. Yet even here it is difficult to resist the suspicion that this lofty tower may have been conceived, not so much as a tribute to the glory of God as a memorial to the greatness of Thomas Luttrell. In any case it represented another departure from the strict Cistercian rule which decreed that the houses of this reformed order should not feature lofty towers or spires. Perhaps St. Bernard saw in such aspiring shafts of stone a danger of spiritual pride, and in the case of the Luttrell Tower such a view was probably justified. If pride built the tower, then assuredly it symbolized pride’s speedy and inevitable fall for it did not long outlive its builder.
By Abbot Luttrell’s day the monastic community had greatly changed. The number of conversi had dwindled considerably, while of the monks in choir, few now conconcerned themselves with any practical secular activity. The practice of leasing lands which had been introduced by force majeure after the Black Death had been much extended with the consequence that the larger proportion of the Abbey lands was now farmed by tenants. Thus the greater part of the Abbey’s wealth was now derived from rents and dues, and Chapter and Parlour which had once been as full of talk of crops and stock as a farm kitchen had now become the administrative offices of a great estate.
After the dissolution the extent of monastic corruption was frequently exaggerated in order to justify the event, thus creating a misleading picture which has survived down to our own day. Where so many autonomous communities were concerned no generalization can be valid, but where, as at Winterstoke, some records survive, they usually reveal that conditions on monastic estates were generally better than on those of the great lay landlords. Rents were in some cases higher, but tenants and even sub-tenants enjoyed security of tenure, freedom from rack-renting which gave them an incentive to improve their holdings, and the material benefits of the example and instruction provided by the greatest agriculturists of the age. The home farm which supplied the needs of the Abbey continued to be a model of good husbandry for the tenants, while the Abbey kept a ‘poor purse’ for the relief of those in trouble. Nevertheless, because the Cistercians of Winterstoke had so far relaxed their rule as to become wealthy landlords instead of poor husbandmen
they became the object of a growing pressure of resentment and envy; the more so since they were members, not of an English, but of a European order which was represented, in this instance, by the mother house of Citeaux.
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