It’s mid-August and the summer holiday season is in full swing. “Staycation” is the word of the season and a good many of you will, I hope, be planning a day trip or two to the magnificent monastic ruins that populate the English landscape.
If I have anything to do with it, you’ll come away enriched, educated and entertained by the experience and also a little surprised and confounded. How many people, I wonder, know that medieval monks and nuns went on holiday, enjoying activities that even after a distance of half a millennium or more are still considered the essential attributes of a good summer break?
That vacations were a feature of the monastic life does indeed seem somewhat counterintuitive. The various Rules governing life within the cloister set exacting standards, dividing the monastic day into periods dedicated to communal prayer, meditative reading and manual labour. It was believed that only through strict observance of the regulations would monks and nuns find spiritual contentment and be ultimately rewarded with a hasty passage through the pains of Purgatory and a place in Heaven. There was, therefore, no mention in any of the Rules of the need for a restorative fortnight break in the countryside.
Nevertheless, it was accepted that the repetition and rigours of the monastic life could take their toll and lead to a condition called accidie, best defined as “the laying low of the soul”. It was acknowledged as a hazard for monks from the very dawn of Western monasticism.
Monasteries were accordingly consciously planned and built to facilitate maximum tranquillity and spiritual contentment. Aelred, the saintly third abbot of Rievaulx, described his abbey’s cloister as an earthly paradise. The orchards at Bury St Edmunds Abbey were cultivated for their beauty as much as their produce, convalescing monks encouraged to stroll along the shady paths to hasten their recovery. The community at Hailes Abbey was permitted to take recreation in the fields near the monastery two or three times a week, though they were expressly forbidden to stray beyond the precincts of the abbey to sink a few jars at the local alehouse.
The playing of games was also widely indulged. Chess pieces have been recovered from Kirkstall and Rievaulx, dice from Battle and there can hardly be a monastery anywhere in the land that doesn’t have a stone slab incised with the outline of the popular board game Nine Men’s Morris, a sort of medieval naughts and crosses. Sporting activities were far from uncommon. The monks at Durham Cathedral Priory had a bowling green, archery is documented at several monasteries, and the community at Whitby was one of many admonished for keeping hunting dogs and indulging in the excitement of the chase.
Monks and nuns also went on what we would recognisable as holidays. A stay at a property especially put aside for the purpose allowed the religious to obtain respite from life within their home monastery while still remaining true to their vows and vocation. Several large and wealthy abbeys even transformed one of their smaller dependent monasteries, or cells, into a rest or holiday home.
Finchale Priory is a good example. It’s already featured in an earlier column as the home of St Godric, the 12th-century hermit and holy man. By the middle of the 14th century, Benedictine monks from Durham Cathedral Priory were sent to Finchale for the purposes of recreation and within half a century, four of the eight monks resident there at any one time were holidaying. Their monastic timetable was relaxed, and on a rotating basis, the vacationing monks were excused getting up at 2am to sing the night office, effectively allowing them a holiday lie-in. They were also permitted to dine at the prior’s table, thus enabling them to feast on finer victuals than would otherwise have been available. A visit to Finchale also provided monks with an opportunity to catch up on their reading. Holiday reads were packed into saddlebags before departing Durham, the monks, like many a modern holidaymaker, often leaving the books behind when returning home. This was much to the annoyance of the prior of Durham who periodically had to recall the volumes discarded in this way. Or the monks could call upon Finchale’s own library, a 16th-century catalogue showing that it held about 40 books covering theology, canon law, philosophy and medicine: a sizable and varied collection for a priory of its size.
There are also hints that vacationing monks were prone to letting their hair down (or as much of it as their tonsures would allow). St Albans Abbey owned nearby Redbourn Priory and used it as a rest house. Early in the 15th century, the monks on holiday there were reprimanded for their late-night get-togethers. Monks from Peterborough Abbey who were holidaying at Oxney Priory were admonished for boozing well into the night.
Other monasteries used one of their manors as a holiday retreat. For Rievaulx Abbey this was the manor house at Skiplam. In the early 16th century, up to eight monks, about a third of the Rievaulx community at this time, joined their abbot to hunt and hawk at the manor during the summer months. By this time, monks and nuns were also taking more modest vacations, temporarily leaving the cloister to visit their families, a touching reminder of the strong bonds that endured between the religious and their loved ones in the outside world.
Modern historians have often taken a dim view of all this, censoriously citing holidays as evidence of late medieval monastic decline, decadence and deviation from the strict Rules of the founders. But I take a much more indulgent view and see these holidays not as a failing but as a strength of monasticism in the Middle Ages, a necessary accommodation with the realities of human nature, with breaks from the demands of the cloister giving monks and nuns the nourishment and strength needed to maintain their way of life. Anyone who’s come back from holiday with their batteries recharged and their mind at peace will empathise.
What do you think?
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