Religious Women

 There were many ways for women to show their religiosity in the Middle Ages. The most obvious of course was by becoming a nun, entering a monastery for women.  Although such nunneries became common in the late Middle Ages, when a large proportion of the nuns had entered the cloister as girls, for much of the Middle Ages such houses were far outnumbered by male monasteries.

In the early and high Middle Ages, most of the nuns did not enter as girls but rather as mature women.  Men too did not always enter as boys; the Cistercian order, for example, was made up primarily of monks who had converted as young men, and many an elderly man decided to improve his chances at heaven by spending his final year or two as a monk.  But there were a whole lot of nuns who had entered the house in middle age, not old age, usually because they were widowed--a common event when women tended to marry much older men.

It was these experienced middle-aged women who tended to become abbess.  At the double-monasteries of the early Middle Ages and of twelfth-century houses like Fontevraud, where a male house and a female house had a single head, the head was always a middle-aged woman.

But how else could a woman be religious?  Nunneries usually followed the same Benedictine Rule as male monasteries, but just as there were houses of male canons, who lived more or less like monks but who also served as priests for their community, there were some houses for canonesses.  Although of course they did not serve as priests, they might take care of people at a hospital.  (Even today, nurses in Britain are called Sister, a reminder of this old function.)

Canonesses lived in a cloistered setting, like nuns, but one could still be a religious woman outside the cloister.  In medieval cities, from the thirteenth century onward, there grew up forms of the religious life for women where the women continued to live in their own houses and do their normal activities but still practice a more contemplative life.  They might have a rule formally endorsed by a bishop and practice chastity as well as meeting regularly for prayer.

But some of these lay sisterhoods did not bother with a formal rule.  They followed a life that combined religiosity in both a public and private setting but took no vows.  From their point of view, they were living like the original apostles as described in the Book of Acts in the Bible.  The Beguines, found primarily in cities of Flanders, sought to help their fellow citizens through good works as well as trying to be fair and honest in their own commercial dealings.  They met regularly to encourage each other and to pray together.

The danger was that, without vows or formal oversight from the church hierarchy, they were considered (at least by the church hierarchy) to be in danger of slipping into heresy.  Some of them did, making up their own versions of religious doctrine--which of course they believed was true Christianity (the bishops disagreed).  Some got into serious trouble and ended up shipped off to real nunneries.  Some were allowed to continue as long as they kept quiet about it.

And then there were the recluses, women who set themselves up in a tiny house build on the outside of a church.  They would of course need the approval of the priest or bishop.  This practice was more frequent before nunneries became common.  The woman in essence was a hermit in her cell, except that she was usually in the middle of town or village, not out in the woods, where everyone agreed (even including the women) females ought not to be by themselves.  Most of these recluses had enough food to live on donated by the pious and regularly attended Mass in the adjoining church.  But in an extreme version the recluse might be walled up in her cell and not leave at all.

These recluses are often referred to as "anchorites" by British historians, although no anchor was involved, and there is no medieval cognate for the term.

Some of ways medieval women showed their religiosity must have been very hard on their bodies.  But as Peter Abelard pointed out in the early twelfth century,  because women's bodies were weaker than men's, their virtue was so much greater in enduring physical privation.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025


For more on medieval religion and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Peasant rents

As I have discussed before, medieval peasants were not slaves.  By our standards they worked like dogs and died, worn out, at an age we would still consider young and fun.  But they had a perhaps surprising amount of control over their own lives, and in the High Middle Ages one might consider most of them agricultural tenants.

They paid rents, no more the slave of their landlord than people who rent an apartment now are the slave of their landlord.  The rents however were not the checks that we might write.  Rather, they were a mix of produce, other agricultural products (like wine or animals), manual labor, and coins.

A typical example is provided by a charter issued for the nunnery of Marcigny in 1104.  A widow named Rotrudis wanted to "take the habit" (as becoming a nun was called) and gave Marcigny all the land she had inherited from her father.  (Monasteries and nunneries expected entry gifts, because the monks or nun was going to be fed and clothed for the rest of their life.)  The land came complete with the peasants who lived on it.  They had been paying their rents to Rotrudis, and now they would pay them to the nunnery.  The charter spelled out what the nuns could expect to receive each year:  forty-two loaves of bread, forty-two bushels of oats, forty-two gallons of wine, four sheep, four piglets, four adult pigs, nine chickens (capons were specified), and twenty-three pennies.

(I note the recurring number 42--wasn't that supposed to be the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything"?  Credit The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.)

The peasants clearly had fairly prosperous farms, to be able to pay this amount in rent and have far more left to feed their families.  One will also note the mix of grain, animals, wine, and coin.  Although this particular charter did not mention labor dues, other charters from the same period often mentioned that a peasant family would send someone to work on the landlord's fields once or twice a week, or that the peasants might be expected to help with work at harvest time or provide carts for bringing the harvest from a distant field to the landlord.

Here the rents that Rotrudis had been receiving, and which the nuns would receive in the future, were spelled out in writing.  However, this was probably the first time that this had been done.  The peasants knew how much they owed.  Rotrudis knew, and presumably her father had known, back when the land in question had been his.  But since normally rent obligations were not written down (and the peasants would not have known how to read anyway), memory had to keep everyone honest.

One should also note that not all peasants were tenants.  Some held their property as "allods," land that they owned outright.  In practice, most peasants probably had some allodial land and rented other land, often from more than one landlord.  Memory was expected to keep track of a lot.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval peasants, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback!

Fontevraud

As I mentioned briefly in a recent post on double monasteries, one of the very few double monasteries (a house with both monks and nuns) in the High Middle Ages was Fontevraud, in Anjou (western France).  Both men and women in religious orders, as well as lepers in a separate lazar-house, were under the direction of an abbess, a woman.

Fontevraud is worth further discussion.  It became a royally-favored monastery, where kings and queens of England were buried in the late twelfth century (because these kings and queens also controlled Normandy and Anjou in France), but its origins were far from elegant or royal.  Below is the tomb of Richard the Lionheart.

The monastery was originally founded at the beginning of the twelfth century by a man named Robert of Arbrissel.  He had been a preacher and a hermit in the late eleventh century, like many men who read (or heard) the New Testament's call for radical rejection of things of the world.  He soon gathered other hermits around him to form a small monastery.

But he always wanted to preach as well as to withdraw from the world.  He managed (exactly how has never been clear) to become officially recognized by the pope as an apostolic preacher, and he spent much of his life wandering around, going from city to city to preach salvation and the importance of giving up worldly things.

These days we tend to cross the street to avoid someone shouting about salvation.  At that time, without all the forms of entertainment we take for granted, a preacher was interesting and exciting.  And Robert was apparently very persuasive.  He would often gather a group of penitents who would then follow him when he left town, full of religious enthusiasm.

A lot of these were women.  Probably most of them soon said, "What was I thinking?" and turned back, rather than sleep out in a field on the way to the next town, but some persisted.  This was very disturbing to the local bishop.  He essentially accused Robert of luring women away from their families to satisfy his own sexual urges, especially since some of the penitent women appear to have been prostitutes.  Both Robert and the women said this was most certainly not the case.

But Robert was persuaded to found a nunnery for these women, rather than have them continue to wander around with him.  This nunnery was Fontevraud.  Men who had also followed Robert were welcome at Fontevraud, but in a separate structure away from the nuns.  A woman was made abbess of the whole congregation.  Robert ordered that all abbesses should be women who had previously been married and who had experience in worldly administration, rather than women who had become nuns as young girls.

You notice that Robert did not become abbot himself.  This is because an abbot would have had to stay with his monks, whereas Robert was soon off preaching again.  He did not dress in proper clerical garb (or what the bishop considered proper clerical garb), but rather went around looking like a hermit, barefoot, in rough and dirty clothes, and did not bother with hair and beard grooming.  This was very disturbing to the bishop, who accused him of looking like a madman or the village idiot.  Exactly what constituted holiness was contested territory.

Robert's biography was written twice after his death in 1117, probably in the hope (ultimately unsuccessful) that he would be declared a saint.  Both versions of his "life" have been translated by Bruce L. Venarde in Robert of Arbrissel:  A Medieval Religious Life (Catholic University Press, 2003).

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on monks, nuns, and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.

Nunneries

Both men and women could enter the convent during the Middle Ages.  As I discussed in an earlier post on monasticism, male monasticism came first, and until the late Middle Ages there were more houses for monks than for nuns.

Yet there were also nunneries in the West from the sixth century onward.  During the early medieval period, one would sometimes find double monasteries, with a house for men and a house for women next to each other.  Such a double house would inevitably be ruled by a woman, an abbess, rather than a male abbot.

Because the medieval view of women was that they were equal to men in the eyes of God, it was considered appropriate for them too to enter the monastic life, even though rules for women were less harsh than those for men, in the assumption that women's weaker bodies could handle less rigor.  On the other hand, their physical weakness was also considered a sign of spiritual strength, because they had more to overcome.

Due to the relative shortage of nunneries for much of the Middle Ages, women might be forced to set themselves up in little cells, perhaps next to a monastery, if they wanted to devote themselves to the religious life.

Whereas the majority of monks throughout the Middle Ages had entered the cloister as boys and grew up as monks, probably the majority of nuns, until the late Middle Ages, were adult converts.  Certainly a young girl could go off and join the nuns, but they were outnumbered by women who had been widowed and decided that they had had enough of dealing with men.  As well as widows, the adult converts included women whose husbands had decided to become monks--at least theoretically, if one spouse entered the cloister, both were supposed to.  Such women, experienced in the affairs of the world and often having managed a castle, were considered appropriate choices as abbesses.

Nunneries, like monasteries, might run day schools, where girls from the region would go to get an education.  These pupils might decide in their teens that they would like to become nuns, but most used their education in the secular world.  By the late Middle Ages, cities would normally have at least one nunnery, providing both education and a home for religious women.

One of the challenges for a nunnery was dealing with laymen.  The abbess would do so, although many of the nuns would never see a male again after taking their vows.  Most nunneries would have men who could act as their representatives in secular affairs where a nun would be at a disadvantage.  Another big challenge was the liturgy.  Because women could not become priests, an abbess would have to have a priest under her direction to say Mass.  The nuns, however, could and did sing the psalms, just as did monks.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

For more on medieval nuns and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.