Who Did the Farming While the Monks Prayed? Men Who Were Also Monks

These were full members of a religious community who took vows and lived under the rule, and whose primary occupation was manual work rather than the sung services that occupied the choir monks for much of the day. They attended a shorter and simpler round of prayer, frequently in their own part of the church, learned by heart rather than read. They ate and slept separately, wore a different habit, and were not ordained. The distinction was one of function and of literacy rather than of religious commitment.

It solved a practical problem that older monastic orders had ducked:

• •The full round of daily services took many hours
• •Leaving little time for the manual labour the rule required
• •Older houses solved this by using tenants and hired labour
• •Reforming orders objected to living off rents and serf labour
• •So they created a category of member who worked instead
• •Which kept the labour inside the community

The scale of the operation these members ran is easily underestimated. Cistercian houses in particular built networks of outlying farms, each staffed by such members living away from the monastery under a senior one, and those farms were run as a single coordinated enterprise. They cleared woodland, drained marsh, managed enormous flocks of sheep and dominated the English and Burgundian wool trade. They operated mills, forges, quarries and fisheries. Several orders became among the most efficient agricultural producers in Europe entirely on this basis.

The arrangement is visible in surviving architecture and is one of the easier things to read in a ruined abbey. A church built for such a community is divided by a screen into two separate spaces with two sets of stalls, one for the choir monks in the east and one for the working members in the west, each with its own entrance. Their living quarters occupy a separate range of buildings along one side of the cloister, with their own dormitory and dining hall. The great barns that survive at several sites were built to hold what those outlying farms produced.

The arrangement declined sharply in the fourteenth century and the reasons are instructive. Recruitment fell away as population collapsed after the plague and as wage labour became well paid and readily available, so the alternative to joining improved dramatically. Tensions within houses are documented, since the working members did the hardest labour, ate worse and had no voice in governance, and there are records of organised resistance and occasional violence. Monasteries responded by leasing their farms to tenants, which is precisely the arrangement the system had been created to avoid.

Full members who took vows but did manual work rather than the long sung services let reforming orders keep their labour inside the community instead of living off rents. They ran networks of outlying farms and dominated the medieval wool trade. Recruitment collapsed after the plague when wage work became attractive, and monasteries went back to leasing land to tenants.