Families and Monasteries

 As I have discussed earlier, monasteries originally grew out of hermitages, places where men (and eventually women in their own nunneries) could live in uninterrupted silence, separate from the affairs of the world, engrossed in prayer and contemplation.'

But medieval families were very much involved in monasteries.  Even though a monk supposedly gave up his fleshly family for the family of brother-monks under the fatherly direction of the abbot (abba just means father), there were numerous ways that non-monastic members of a family could be involved with the monastery.

First and perhaps most important, for most monasteries the monks had all joined as boys.  The parents gave their child as what was called a "bloodless sacrifice," hoping to save his soul and theirs as well.  They might never see the boy again, or at least not for many years, and they were expected to make a sizeable gift when he was accepted as a novice.  Although the boy would not officially become a monk until he made his own decision to do so in his teens, in practice few left the cloister.

In making their son a novice monk, an "oblate" as he was called (the word means "offering"), the family was thus closely involved with the monastery.  In a number of cases virtual dynasties would be established, as a boy would be placed in the same monastery where his uncle was already a monk, someone for whom he might indeed be named (indicating, as other evidence also makes clear, that parents were not just waiting until they saw how many children they were going to have and then dumped the excess into a monastery).  When he grew up, he might welcome a nephew of his own into the cloister.

Even without having a family member in a monastery, family members might try to establish a connection with it over the generations, choosing a particular house to which to make repeated pious gifts over the years, to ensure that the monks would be praying for them.  These days tracing a family's history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries can often be accomplished by reading through the records of a particular monastery in which family members repeatedly appear, either making gifts or trying to reclaim the gifts made by the previous generation.

There are also instances in which a family committed what might be considered dynastic suicide, having everybody join the church, the males going into a monastery, the females into a nunnery.  This was the case with the family of Bernard of Clairvaux, the best known member of the twelfth-century Cistercian order.  He had been intended for a knightly life, but at a certain point, seized with religious fervor, he and a group of his friends all joined the monastery as young adults.

His family's initial reaction was shock, but soon all his brothers (with their wives), his sisters, his parents, and an uncle all joined the church (the uncle became Grandmaster of the Templars).  Originally the family members told the youngest son that he was going to stay a knight and carry on the family dynasty, but after a few years he announced he was not going to forgo Paradise just to carry on some lineage, and he too became a monk.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on families and the medieval church, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Monasticism and secular society

In an earlier post, I defined medieval monasticism.  Here I shall give more detail on the relations between the monks and the powerful leaders of society.

First of all, it is crucial to keep in mind that "the church" and "secular society" were not separate, discrete units.  They constantly interacted.  Indeed, church leaders, the bishops and abbots, were frequently the brothers and cousins of secular leaders.  Those electing church leaders just took it for granted that those coming out of the leading families were more suited to command.

This did not however mean that church leaders were just the pawns of the powerful.  Instead, for much of the Middle Ages, it worked the other way.  A lord who misbehaved was likely to be subject to an extremely serious talk from an extremely close relative in the church.

Probably the majority of monks were also from the upper levels of society.  Monasteries normally expected an entry gift, to pay for the upkeep (for life) of the new monk, and peasant families would not have felt they could spare any children.  This did not mean of course that noble families were disposing of "extra" children, for giving a son or daughter to the church was always treated as a sacrifice, giving one's most precious possession to God.

These child offerings (called "oblates") were the most common sort of medieval monk or nun, brought up in the cloister, rarely if ever seeing relatives again.  But some twelfth-century monasteries did not take child oblates, requiring instead adults who made the decision themselves.

Young knights frequently joined such houses, filled with religious enthusiasm, as excited to be giving up everything for God as they might, in other circumstances, have been excited to go on Crusade or to a tournament or to war.  They would have to know Latin already to join, meaning a good education was required.  Young adult peasants might experience the same enthusiasm, but without an education they could only become sort of halfway monks, conversi as they were called, who ended up doing a lot of the agricultural work.

Few men "converted" to the religious life in their middle years, though women might if widowed.  (One spouse really could not enter the cloister while the other stayed in the world.)  In old age, both men and women often "took the habit" as they felt themselves dying, as a last attempt to atone for their sins.  Complications arose if they recovered from what they had thought was a fatal illness and decided they had changed their minds--for you could not change your mind about an oath to God.

As well as becoming monks and nuns themselves, nobles were the biggest donors to the monasteries, hoping to gain the favor of a monastery's saints through their generosity.  They might even found a brand new monastery.  The image above is of St.-Etienne of Caen, the monastery William the Conqueror, duke of Normandy, founded in the wake of his 1066 conquest of England, to try to make amends for the deaths of so many people.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014