Monastic Life in the Medieval British Isles: Essays in Honour of Janet Burton

MONASTIC LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL BRITISH ISLES

MONASTIC LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL BRITISH ISLES

Essays in Honour of Janet Burton

EDITED BY

KAREN STÖBER, JULIE KERR AND EMILIA JAMROZIAK

© The Contributors, 2018

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ISBN: 978-1-78683-322-8 (hardback)

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Cover image: Byland Abbey, drawing by Dani Leiva.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of illustrations

List of abbreviations

List of contributors

Introduction

Karen Stöber and Emilia Jamroziak

Part I: Monastic and religious orders in Britain

1. Cistercian histories in late medieval England, and beyond

James Clark

2. ‘Like a mother between father and sons.’ The role of the prior in later medieval English monasteries

Martin Heale

3. Formed by word and example: the training of novices in fourteenth-century Dublin

Colmán Ó Clabaigh

4. Strata Florida: a former Welsh Cistercian Abbey and its future

David Austin

Part II: Religious and laity

5. The world of bishops in religious orders in medieval Ireland, 1050–1230

Edel Bhreathnach

6. Art, architecture, piety and patronage at Rievaulx Abbey, c .1300–1538

Michael Carter

7. The last days of Bridlington Priory

Claire Cross

8. Galwegians and Gauls: Aelred of Rievaulx’s dramatisation of xenophobia in Relatio de Standardo

Marsha L. Dutton

9. The cloister of the soul: Robert Grosseteste and the monastic houses of his diocese

Philippa Hoskin

10. The abbey of St Benet of Holme and the English rising of 1381

Andrew Prescott

Part III: Women in the medieval monastic world

11. Looking for medieval female religious in Britain and Ireland: sources, methodologies and pitfalls

Kimm Curran

12. ‘As for a nun’: corrodies, nunneries and the laity

Brian Golding

13. Preaching to nuns in the Norwich diocese on the eve of the Reformation: the evidence from visitation records

Veronica O’Mara

Select Bibliography

Bibliography of Janet Burton’s publications

Tabula Gratulatoria

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors are indebted to the help and encouragement of many people in the making of this book. We would like to thank the University of Wales Press and especially Llion Wigley and Siân Chapman for their support and patience throughout this project. We are grateful to our contributors for producing their chapters cheerfully despite the tight deadlines and strict word limit, and to all those who have participated in the Tabula Gratulatoria .

Our thanks to Dani Leiva for his evocative drawing of Byland Abbey which is on the front cover and which Dani drew specifically for this Festschrift. Byland Abbey holds a special place in Janet’s heart and in her research, making this a fitting tribute. We are indebted to William Marx, Our Man in Lampeter, for without his conspiratorial help and support this project would not have been possible. Throughout, William has provided us with the necessary names, facts and figures, and he moreover compiled the list of Janet’s publications – no mean feat. We thank Paul Watkins for the photograph of Janet in the Founders’ Library. Paul managed to dupe Janet into posing for this picture: we commend his guile.

Finally, we would like to thank everybody who has helped to keep this project a secret from Janet, allowing us to surprise her with the presentation of this book.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: Janet Burton

Photograph: Paul Watkins.

FIGURE 1: The foundation history of Forde Abbey as preserved in the 18 early fifteenth-century genealogy of the Courtenay earls of Devon, now held at Powderham Castle (fol. 5v). © Powderham Estate and Exeter Digital Humanities.

FIGURE 2: The former monastery of Strata Florida (red shading) 55 in its topography looking westwards towards the Irish Sea. With kind permission of the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales.

FIGURE 3: The Great Abbey site. Property of the Strata Florida Trust, 57 in the darker shade of grey. © David Austin.

FIGURE 4: What is currently known of the abbey precinct as redesigned 58 in 1184 and functioning at its height in the thirteenth century. © David Austin.

FIGURE 5: Speculative plan of a possible earlier monastery under 60 Strata Florida Cistercian Abbey. © David Austin.

FIGURE 6: Strata Florida House and designed landscape in 1765. 62 © David Austin.

FIGURE 7: Bishop Gilbert of Limerick’s De statu ecclesiae, Durham 72 Cathedral Library, MS B.II.35, fol. 36v. © Durham Cathedral Library.

FIGURE 8: Rievaulx Abbey, presbytery, c.1220. 90 Photograph: Michael Carter.

FIGURE 9: Rievaulx Abbey, fragmentary sculpture of Christ in Majesty, 93 c.1260–70. Photograph: Historic England.

FIGURE 10: Rievaulx Abbey, ex-situ stonework inscribed 95 SCS Williamus Abbas from the shrine of Abbot William. Photograph: Historic England.

FIGURE 11: Rievaulx Abbey, limestone relief sculpture of 96 the Annunciation to the Virgin, c.1500, above the entrance to the late medieval abbatial lodging. Photograph: Michael Carter.

ABBREVIATIONS

CONTRIBUTORS

David Austin is professor emeritus at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and director of the Strata Florida Research Project.

Edel Breathnach is CEO of The Discovery Programme.

Michael Carter is senior properties historian at English Heritage.

James Clark is professor of history at the University of Exeter and associate dean for research and knowledge transfer.

Claire Cross is professor emeritus at the University of York.

Kimm Curran is an affiliate researcher in the Medical Humanities Research Centre at the University of Glasgow. She is publicity officer and on the steering committee for the History of Women Religious in Britain and Ireland.

Marsha L. Dutton is emeritus professor of English at Ohio University and executive editor of Cistercian Publications.

Brian Golding was formerly reader at the University of Southampton.

Martin Heale is reader in medieval history at the University of Liverpool and director of Liverpool Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Philippa Hoskin is professor of medieval studies at the University of Lincoln.

Colmán Ó Clabaigh O.S.B. is a Benedictine monk of Glenstal Abbey, Co. Limerick.

Veronica O’Mara is professor of medieval English literature at the University of Hull.

Andrew Prescott is professor of digital humanities (English language and linguistics) at the University of Glasgow.

Janet Burton

INTRODUCTION

Karen Stöber and Emilia Jamroziak

The present book has come into being to pay tribute to a very special person, scholar and teacher, Professor Janet Burton. Janet graduated from Westfield College, University of London in 1973 where she was taught by two distinguished medieval historians, Christopher Brooke and Rosalind Hill. After London, she completed her DPhil in the Department of History and Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York. Her thesis on the development of monasticism in Yorkshire in the century and a half after the Norman invasion of England was supervised by Professor Barrie Dobson. Janet subsequently worked for several years as an archivist, first at what was then known as The Borthwick Institute of Historical Research at York and thereafter at the Ceredigion Record Office in Aberystwyth, an experience that helped to shape her subsequent research. In 1994 Janet was appointed lecturer at University of Wales, Lampeter (now University of Wales Trinity Saint David), then senior lecturer, reader and, from 2006, professor of medieval history. Throughout her long teaching career Janet has been dedicated to her students. Her charisma and encouragement have brought the medieval period alive to undergraduates and postgraduates who are indebted to her for kindling a keen interest in the subject.

Janet’s contribution to British medieval monastic studies is as far-reaching as it is profound and over the past forty years she has contributed substantially to our knowledge of a wide range of aspects relating to the study of monastic history in medieval Britain, especially in Yorkshire and Wales. This is reflected in her long list of publications, which is appended to this volume. Janet is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society of which she is a former member of council and vice-president. As well as writing and publishing her own research, Janet has been instrumental in fostering the work of others through the publication of a series of edited volumes. She has been especially encouraging to junior academics, involving them in conferences and helping them to get a foothold on the academic ladder. The Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies which she founded with Karen Stöber in 2010 and which has been published by Brepols since 2012, and the accompanying book series Medieval Monastic Studies (Brepols), both aim to be an international platform for the dissemination of current research. Moreover, since 2008 Janet has been the co-director of the Monastic Wales Project (www.monasticwales.org), together with Karen Stöber. This project combines scholarly rigour with accessibility and reflects Janet’s commitment to stimulate new and interdisciplinary research and to make this available to the public and relevant to the wider academic world. It has been an inspirational model for similar endeavours on regional approaches to monastic culture.

Janet’s scholarly activity has not been limited to academic publications and she has had more than her five minutes of TV fame, notably when she accompanied Dan Snow on his Norman Walks in Yorkshire and explained to Huw Edwards the importance of Strata Florida Abbey in the BBC documentary The Story of Wales.

Despite her busy professional schedule and such a prolific scholarly output, Janet has never neglected her active personal life and has always made time for family, friends and travel. She is a regular swimmer, an intrepid ice-skater and has often graced the dance floor at the annual International Medieval Congress at Leeds; and she has been known to explore Catalan cities on the back of a motorbike. Not least she and her husband William Marx have been generous and warm hosts to many colleagues and acquaintances over the years and many of us who have contributed to this volume have been recipients of their kind hospitality.

The impact of Janet’s scholarship has made itself felt in the study of medieval monastic history in general, but has perhaps been strongest in those fields that she has predominantly focused on over the decades, namely monasticism in Yorkshire, the Cistercian Order, the regular canons and the religious houses of Wales.

THE CISTERCIANS AND YORKSHIRE

The DPhil thesis Janet completed in 1977 at the University of York on ‘The origins and development of the religious orders in Yorkshire c.1069 to c.1200’ was a major turning point in the historiography of the medieval religious history of northern England, but it also opened a new perspective on the development of monasticism in the British Isles from the eleventh to the late thirteenth century. This work has set a new agenda for the study of Cistercian history and this subject area has remained an important strand of Janet’s work for decades. The thesis was revised and published as a monograph study in 1999 but in the interim Janet published extensively on monasticism and Yorkshire; this early work reflects her expertise in the source material related to the Yorkshire religious houses. In most cases Janet’s work provides the first new interpretations of this material since the era of antiquarian studies, such as her studies on the charters from Byland Abbey and Lenton Priory, the confraternity list of St Mary’s Abbey, the cartulary of the York Minster treasurer, as well as her pioneering work on Yorkshire nunneries in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, published in 1979.¹ These early publications bear the hallmarks of Janet’s impressive scholarship, namely, in approaching monastic material within a wider social and cultural context, as well as offering detailed examinations and an often innovative approach to neglected sources. Beginning with her DPhil thesis and continuing with her publications in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Janet steered the approach to Cistercian history in the north as well as the religious history of Yorkshire away from both antiquarian approaches and the separation of monastic history from its wider socio-political context. The transformative impact of Janet’s work on Cistercian monasticism was recognised by the inclusion of her chapter on the foundations of the British Cistercian houses in the 1986 volume on Cistercian Art and Architecture in the British Isles, edited by Christopher Norton and David Park, an important work and the first systematic study of this subject, which has remained current for several decades.² Janet’s chapter in this volume encapsulates her novel approach to the foundation processes and complex interrelationship between monastic communities and their founders, bishops, benefactors and other authorities, which can no longer be seen as a simple linear development. The theme of foundation and its mechanisms, as well as the formation of monastic estates, is the subject of her 1998 article on ‘The estates and economy of Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire’, which became a definitive study of the chronology of the early years of Rievaulx and the complexities of its ‘foundation charter’. Janet returned to these issues in the article she contributed to the Festschrift for Peter Fergusson, an eminent scholar of Cistercian architecture, with whom she collaborated in the early 1990s. In this article she explains the importance and complexity of social networks for the development of Rievaulx Abbey in its social context.³ During the first twenty years of her career, Janet continued to explore the wider monastic history of the north from the Norman Conquest to the end of the thirteenth century. Her articles on Benedictine, Cistercian and Augustinian communities are deeply engaged with the regional context of these institutions as well as more distant connections and influences, for example with Scotland.⁴ In this work she continues and develops an approach to monastic patronage first explored by Christopher Brooke, among others, and embedded monastic history within the social context of twelfth-century English society as examined by, for example, Judith Green.⁵ Janet’s work also resonates with other early studies on the motivations of secular patrons and benefactors by Brian Golding, Emma Mason, Benjamin Thompson and David Postles.⁶ This approach, which Janet Burton has pioneered in relation to the Yorkshire material, later became the hallmark of her work on Wales (see below). Moreover it was the material relating to the north of England that Janet first used to argue for a new understating of the relationship between the Cistercian Order and female communities. She has shown that the ‘Cistercian status’ of the nunneries in Yorkshire was not something permanent but was subject to change over time: while twelve communities claimed at various times to be Cistercian, others started doing so only in the late Middle Ages. Some of these communities followed Cistercian customs without being formally part of the Order. Janet has shown convincingly that the reasons cited by historians for the nuns’ claim of Cistercian status – financial considerations and in particular freedom from the payment of tithes – were not much in evidence in the Yorkshire cases. Rather, it was the interest of patrons and the personal connections with neighbouring male and female houses that influenced the nuns’ desire to follow the Cistercian way of life.⁷

In 1994 Janet Burton published Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain 1000–1300 in the Cambridge Medieval Textbooks series.⁸ This was the first of several synthesis works which she produced in the course of her career, and one that has not been superseded by other publications. It not only explains the pre-Conquest Benedictine communities, but also the role of twelfth-century reform, the emergence of the communities of canons and the arrival of the White Monks. Whilst this volume examines the monastic economy, intellectual life, ideas of reform and the role of tradition, it is a particularly significant contribution to the debates about the role of monastic patronage in the development of monastic networks across the British Isles. The relationship between religious communities and their patrons and benefactors was also central to Janet Burton’s next monograph, The Monastic Order in Yorkshire 1069–1215.⁹ It built on her doctoral work, combined with two decades of further research. It is not only an excellent study of a specific region and its monastic culture in the process of change, but it is also a very important contribution to the discussion about the place of monasticism in medieval society. Why did lay people found monasteries? What were the expectations of benefactors from the monks, and vice versa? This approach was taken up and developed further by Emilia Jamroziak in her monographs on Rievaulx Abbey and on Cistercian communities on different types of medieval frontiers.¹⁰ Janet’s most recent synthesis on Cistercian history and culture was published together with Julie Kerr in 2011.¹¹ It builds on Janet’s extensive knowledge of Cistercian sources, archaeological evidence and regional dynamics of the Cistercian network, combined with Kerr’s in-depth understanding of Cistercian daily life, and brings material from the British Isles into dialogue with evidence from other parts of Christendom.

Source editions have always been a very important strand of Janet’s work as a medieval historian. Very unusually, she combines an impressive portfolio of editions of different types of medieval sources with publications of monographs and edited volumes. In this way the editions and monographs inform each other and give Janet’s work unusual methodological strength: drawing on a detailed and sophisticated understanding of the sources, she pushes the boundaries of interpretation and contextualises even the most minute evidence. Janet’s knowledge of administrative documents, charters and cartularies, as well as narrative texts is exceptional. Amongst her most important editions of primary sources are the volume of documents of the archbishops of York from 1070 to the mid-twelfth century for the English Episcopal Acta; the cartulary of the treasurer of York Minster, for Borthwick Texts and Studies; the cartulary of Byland Abbey for the Surtees Society; The Foundation History of the Abbeys of Byland and Jervaulx for Borthwick Texts and Studies; and the Historia Selebiensis Monasterii – an historical narrative from Selby Abbey, for Oxford Medieval Texts.¹² Her edition of the Byland Abbey cartulary set new standards for editing cartularies that have not survived in their original form, whilst the introduction to the edition of the narrative foundations from Byland and Jervaulx remains the crucial reference point for any discussion on institutional memory, founding myths and the transmission of Cistercian narrative models.

The impact of Janet Burton’s work on both the study of the Cistercian Order in the British Isles and on monasticism in Yorkshire has been transformative for both. Her regional focus, her sophisticated and rigorous approach to the primary sources, as well as her attention to the multifaceted social context have set the standards for all those working in the same area, many of whom have been directly influenced by Janet’s work.

WALES

The study of the history of monastic Wales has been a very uneven affair, and Janet has played an instrumental role in rectifying this. For a long time scholarly interest in Welsh monastic matters tended to focus on certain aspects of monasticism in Wales while disregarding others to a greater or smaller extent. This was frequently due to the uneven distribution of the sources; thus we find some religious orders much more fully represented in the historical writings than others, just as we find a tendency among historians to concentrate on particular facets, notably the economy, or the ‘Welshness’ of a religious group.

In 1976, when Glanmor Williams published the English-language version of his magisterial The Welsh Church from Conquest to Reformation, a book that was to become one of the key works on the medieval church in Wales, he stated that ‘there were in all some forty-seven religious houses left in Wales by the beginning of the Tudor period’.¹³ By this count he failed to include no fewer than eight Benedictine priories (Bassaleg, Cardiff, Carmarthen, Goldcliff, Llanbadarn Fawr, Llandovery, Llangenydd and Llangua), a Cluniac house (St Clears) and two houses of Augustinian canons (St Tudwal’s and Puffin Island). He moreover included the Premonstratensian abbey of Talley with the houses of Augustinian canons. Fortunately, the state of our knowledge of the Welsh monasteries has been steadily improving over the past decades and is continuing to do so. Janet has played a leading role in this development.

Several general works about the Welsh monasteries have emerged over the past decades. David Knowles and R. Neville Hadcock’s reference work on the religious houses of England and Wales, first published in 1953, has very short summaries of the histories of the Welsh monasteries and nunneries, including most of the Benedictine houses omitted by Glanmor Williams (all except Llangenydd and Llangua, which can be found in their list of alien priories), though these are in need of updating; and 1992 saw the appearance of R. Cooper’s guide to the abbeys and priories of Wales, being one of very few books dedicated specifically to Wales’s religious houses, aimed at a broader audience.¹⁴ To this we can now add Janet’s guide to the medieval Welsh monastic communities, written together with Karen Stöber.¹⁵

The Cistercians in Wales

The imbalance in the scholarly interest in medieval Welsh monasticism is very visible in that particular attention has long been paid, for example, to the Cistercian Order, while other religious groups have lingered on the margins in terms of academic publications or archaeological excavations. This is not altogether surprising, given that the White Monks were one of the numerically strongest of the religious groups in medieval Wales, and considering the standing remains of their monasteries, which include some of the most impressive and beautiful in the country, such as Tintern Abbey or Valle Crucis. The Cistercians in Wales have always received a great amount of attention from scholars, poets and artists alike. They have fuelled the imagination and inspired study like no other religious group in medieval Wales. Arguably the most prolific among the scholars of the Welsh Cistercians is David Williams.¹⁶ Williams’s extensive work on the Cistercian Order in Wales has had its critics and needs updating in many respects, yet, and despite its uneven thematic coverage, it remains an important reference work. Alongside David Williams mention must be made of David Robinson, who, as well as publishing, in 2006, his masterful and richly illustrated work on Welsh Cistercian archaeology and architecture, is the author of a large number of outstanding guidebooks to individual Welsh Cistercian monasteries, including the abbeys of Tintern, Basingwerk, Cymer and Neath.¹⁷

One key aspect at the heart of many studies of the Cistercians in Wales has been the issue of patronage and political loyalties among the White Monks; another, that of filiation and the Cistercian family tree. Janet herself has a long-standing interest in the White Monks in Wales, reflected in both her teaching and her research. In 2007, she published an important article on ‘The Cistercians in England and Wales’ in Archaeologia Cambrensis, in which she traces the foundations of the Welsh Cistercian abbeys.¹⁸ Filiation is also the focus of Emilia Jamroziak’s recent study of Clairvaux in the British Isles, which discusses the Welsh monasteries alongside those in England and Scotland.¹⁹

Individual Welsh Cistercian monasteries have also received considerable attention among historians and archaeologists. Perhaps in many ways the most iconic Cistercian house in Wales is the abbey of Strata Florida. Associated since the Middle Ages with cultural production and political involvement, this monastery has long occupied a special place among the houses of White Monks in Wales in the imagination of the populace. At this point it is opportune to mention the ongoing Strata Florida Project, directed by David Austin, which not only seeks to ‘preserve for the benefit of the people of Ceredigion and of the Nation, the historical, architectural and constructional heritage that may exist in and around the Great Abbey Farm of Strata Florida’, but within the framework of which significant excavations have taken place at the site of the former Cistercian abbey of Strata Florida in Ceredigion.²⁰ In this context note especially the work of Jemma Bezant, one of the leaders of the Strata Florida excavations.²¹

Neath Abbey in Glamorgan has also been the focus of a recent research project, led by Daniel Power at Swansea University.²² The abbey has moreover attracted ongoing attention on account of its surviving medieval floor tiles.²³ The study of monastic estates – identifying them and mapping them – has been a key aspect of the study of monastic houses in medieval Wales for many decades.²⁴ And the monastic buildings, too, where they survive, have been the source of much scholarly debate, as the work of CADW and architectural historians and archaeologists like David Robinson and Stuart Harrison has shown.²⁵

The Welsh friars

Other monastic orders have attracted rather less scholarly attention. Thus the Welsh houses of friars, for instance, have provoked considerably less historical debate. Admittedly, the limited surviving documentation and the fact that their buildings have in most cases all but disappeared make their study a somewhat greater challenge than is the case with the Cistercians, Augustinian canons or Benedictines. Nonetheless, there were ten houses of friars in medieval Wales: five Dominican friaries, three houses of Franciscans, and one house each of Carmelites and Austin friars. In 1914, Ruth Easterling wrote her important article on ‘The Friars in Wales’, a work which for a long time stood more or less on its own.²⁶ Only occasional publications made reference to the friars in Wales over the following decades.²⁷ More recently, the friars in Wales have received renewed attention, thanks to the work of Frances Andrews on the Austin friars, that of David Williams on the Carmelites, and that of Jens Röhrkasten on ‘Monasteries and Urban Space in Medieval Welsh Towns’, though the friars remain on the margins of monastic studies in the context of medieval Wales.²⁸

Nunneries in medieval Wales

Similarly on the margins of monastic studies in Wales are the female religious houses. This is in part understandable as there were so very few of them: no more than three nunneries, two Cistercian and one Benedictine, ever flourished in medieval Wales, and these were mostly very small foundations. The foremost scholar of female religiosity in Wales, Jane Cartwright, has studied these communities, the Cistercian houses of Llanlugan and Llanllŷr, and the Benedictine priory of Usk, in both English and Welsh.²⁹ Cartwright’s work aside, publications on women’s monasticism in medieval Wales have been patchy indeed, though the problem lies with quantity rather than quality. In some cases the Welsh nunneries appear alongside female houses in England or on the Continent. Thus Roberta Gilchrist, in her work on Gender and Material Culture, mentions all three female houses, albeit briefly.³⁰ The year 2007 saw the publication of Madeleine Gray and John Guy’s study of the Welsh Cistercian nunneries;³¹ an article by Richard Morgan, published in 1983, discusses the early documentation of Llanllugan;³² and David Williams mentions both Llanllugan and Llanllŷr in his Welsh Cistercians, and he also published an article dedicated to the ‘Cistercian Nunneries in Medieval Wales’ in Cîteaux: Commentarii Cistercienses in 1975.³³ Usk Priory has been the subject of a number of studies as well as excavations;³⁴ while all three of the Welsh nunneries have also been included in online resources such as the Monastic Matrix website, and on Coflein, the online catalogue of the