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.

Medieval seven-year-olds

We all have been seven years old, we all have known seven-year-olds.  First or second grade, full of enthusiasm, at that awkward age where you know what you want but the grownups are still enough bigger that if they don't want it too, it's not going to happen.  Still young enough to be characterized as "tiny tots."

A medieval seven-year-old was considered old enough to know right from wrong, to have reached some version of "the age of reason."  (Various stages kicked in at seven, fourteen, and twenty-one.  The only one we still keep is twenty-one, though some states used to allow driver's licenses at fourteen.)  For example, they could give consent to a donation.

Although birthdays and exact ages were far less important to medieval people than they are in modern times, momentous changes could happen to a child around age seven.  This was the stage when their future life might be decided.

It was at roughly this age that a boy (or more rarely a girl) would be sent off to a monastery as an oblate (literally an "offering"), if the parents decided this child was going to become a monk (or nun).  Contrary to popular belief, parents were not disposing of excess children.  Many large families sent no one to the monastery; others ended up having the entire family enter the cloister.  And of course a large gift was expected to accompany the child, so it was certainly not a way to "get out of" the expense of child rearing.

Going into the monastery was a one-way trip.  An oblate would rarely if ever see his family again, unless he decided not to become a monk after all.  This decision would be made around age fourteen.  In practice, few boys or girls brought up in the cloister, not knowing anything else for seven years, decided to leave.

Alternately, parents might send a boy (not a girl) off to the cathedral school, to start training to become a priest.  Here at least the child would get to see his family again, and if the family lived in town, the boy might be a day pupil, coming home every night (or at least every few weeks).  Here the basic reading and writing a boy had learned from his mother would quickly be augmented with rigorous Latin and theological training.  Even those who did not intend to become priests might go to a cathedral school as a day pupil; the future King Louis VI of France was one example.

Parents who wanted to apprentice their children to a trade would send them off around age seven as well.  Although they would still see the child intermittently, the child would live with the master with whom he (or sometimes she) was training.  And again, a large donation was expected to set a child on this path.  (See more here on guilds and apprenticeship.)

If a family was aristocratic, in the twelfth century or later, the age of seven or so was the age at which boys would be sent off for knighthood training, either with a lord or with an uncle or other appropriate relative.  Again, the child might come back to visit, but his home now was where he was being trained. (See more here on knighthood training.)

Girls were less likely to leave home at age seven, because they weren't trained as knights, were less likely to apprentice in a guild (most guilds, even though not all, were male-dominated), and did not become priests.  The majority of nuns were adult converts, not child oblates.  But by age fourteen a girl, who had been taught both book learning and household management skills by her mother, would be considered old enough to marry.

Of course, the seven-year-old child of a peasant family had fewer possible options; he or she would be expected to start actively helping out in all the chores associated with farming--and to know enough not to be stepped on by the ox.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

(See more here on medieval childhood.)

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