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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Late medieval monastic households shared many features in common with the large secular households of the gentry and aristocracy Indeed, the language used in describing monastic households had always echoed that of the extended secular family with ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ living together under the authority of a superior representing Christ but exercising control of the religious community as a ‘father’ or ‘mother’ figure. While the common life of the monastery was very different in many of its details to the lifestyle of a lay family, monastic legislators used the family relationship to describe the modus operandi of the monastic community St Augustine enjoined his monks to ‘obey your superior as you would a father’, and reminded an errant community of nuns that their superior had been ‘the mother not of your body but of your mind’. St Benedict wrote as ‘a father who loves you’, reminding his followers that God is ‘a loving father’ and urging them to show each other ‘the pure love of brothers’ while accepting the abbot as both the ‘father of the household’ and a ‘spiritual father’ who would provide for all their worldly and spiritual needs. David Rnowles therefore considered the medieval monastic conventus to be a ‘family’ in which a ‘simple family life’ was led by monks under the care of an ever-present superior who acted as a loving paterfamilias in governing the monastery; the monastery was ‘the home of a spiritual family whose life and work begin and end in the family circle’.
An earlier version of chis paper was read at the eighth biennial conference of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Otago, Dunedin, in February 2011. This paper makes use of data collected as part of the University of Hong Kong’s Monastic Database Project (RGC Project no. HKU7176/97H).
1 Ramsey, Boniface, ed., Saint Augustine: The Monastic Rules (New York, 2004)Google Scholar, Praeccptum (Regula tertia) 7.1, Regularis informatio 7.1, 143, Obiturgatio (Letter 211) 4.
2 RB1980: The Rule of St Benedict in English, ed. Fry, Timothy (Collegeville, MN, 1982)Google Scholar, Prologue 1, 7.30, 72.8, 2.7, 49.9 respectively.
3 Knowles, David, The Monastic Order in England, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1963), 302, 404, 300–1, 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Ibid. 440; the word familia is used here in its classical sense of the ‘household’.
5 Knowles, David, The Religious Orders in England, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1948–59), 1: 273–4.Google Scholar
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7 Known members of the Syon familia included 43 lay officials, 7 clerks and servants, 4 priests and 34 annuitants. The domestic servants of the abbey would have added a considerable number to this group.
8 Fletcher, John Rory, The Story of the English Bridgettines of Syon Abbey (South Brent, 1933), 37–9.Google Scholar Fletcher dealt with the various Syon households in more detail in later manuscript notebooks: see Exeter, UL, Syon Abbey Papers, FLE/12, Canon Fletcher notebooks, ‘Syon’s Who’s Who’, 3: 110-14.
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12 Other examples are given in Cooke, Kathleen, ‘The English Nuns and the Dissolution’, in The Cloister and the World: Essays in Medieval History in Honour of Barbara Harvey, ed. Blair, J. and Golding, Brian (Oxford, 1996), 287–301, at 300 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lee, Paul, Learning and Spirituality in Late Medieval English Society: The Dominican Priory of Dartford (York, 2001), 120 Google Scholar; Coldicott, Diane K., Hampshire Nunneries (Chichester, 1989), 143–5 Google Scholar; Paul, John, ‘Dame Elizabeth Shelley, Last Abbess of St Mary’s Abbey, Winchester’, Papers and Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society 23 (1965), 60–71 Google Scholar; Sturman, Winifred M., ‘Barking Abbey: A Study in its External and Internal Administration from the Conquest to the Dissolution’ (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1961), 447 Google Scholar. Further examples are mentioned in Erler, Mary, ‘Religious Women after the Dissolution’, in London and the Kingdom: Essays in Honour of Caroline M. Barron: Proceedings of the 2004 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Davies, Matthew and Prescott, Andrew (Stamford, 2008), 135–45.Google Scholar
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14 I am grateful to John Martin, the current owner of Southlands Manor, for allowing me to visit his home on 2 December 2010; and to Anthony Emery for his assistance in researching the previous history of Southlands. I am also grateful to Adrian Hirst, rector of Denham, who gave me free access to the church of St Mary the Virgin at Denham and allowed me to use the parish’s copy of Lathbury, R. H., History of Denham (Uxbridge, 1904).Google Scholar
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19 This suggestion originates from the work of Canon Fletcher, see ‘Syon’s Who’s Who’, 3: 117. It is possible that Agnes Jordan’s family lived at Jordans, a village five miles to the north-west of Denham.
20 Mary Denham had a pension of £6 p.a. and was initially with Richard Whitford’s household, between October 1540 and May 1541. Her pension was last paid on 10 December 1553 and she appears to have died on 23 August 1554: Kew, TNA, E315/262, fol. 2V.
21 Leonard Hurst was rector of Denham c. 1550 and died in 1560.
22 Agnes Jordan’s pension was £200 p.a. and Richard Whitford’s was £8, while eight of the other religious had pensions valued at between £6 and £6 13s. 8d. The two lay brothers had smaller sums of £2 13s. 8d.
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24 Agnes Jordan’s will: TNA, PROB/11/31, dated 28 October 1545, proven 9 February 1546.
25 For these payments, see TNA, E315/250, fols 19v (10 January 1541), 24v (6 April 1541), 29r (4 July 1541), 32r ([23] October 1541). Thomas Scudamore, the abbess’s chaplain, acted as her agent in collecting these pensions.
26 The house is described as it was in the early twentieth century by the Royal Commission for Historical Monuments, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Buckinghamshire, 2 vols (London, 1912-13), 1: 119.
27 TNA, E315/250, fol. 27r; E315/251, fol. 12r-v.
28 See the biographies of Sir Palmer, Henry and Palmer, Sir Thomas in ODNB, and for Palmer, Katherine, online at: <www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/96817>..>Google Scholar
29 Katherine Palmer’s new household consisted of Dorothy Slighte, Margery Covert, Mary Nevell, Mary Watno, Anthony Little and John Massey from Southlands, Jane Rushe and Anne Dauncy from Prioress Margaret Windsor’s household, and Clemence Tresham. The eight women and two men survived on pension payments totalling only £58 13s. 4d. p.a.
30 TNA, E315/257, fols 1v–7v; E315/258, fol. 6r.
31 Katherine Palmer was the first to arrive at Termonde/Dendermonde on 24 June 1550, followed on 28 August by Dorothy Slighte and Margery Covert. Anthony Little and John Massey also arrived in 1550, but Mary Nevell and Anne Dauncey came later, in July and October 1552. I am grateful to Mary Erler for providing these dates from Ulla Sander Olsen’s edition of the chronicle of Maria Troon Abbey. See also Mary C. Erler, ‘The Effects of Exile on English Monastic Spirituality: Peryn’s, William Spirituall Excrcyses, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42 (2012), 519–37, at 528–9.Google Scholar