Renunciation

Janet Burton

Renunciation is a theme that ran through a wide variety of religious experience in medieval England and touched the lives of many people. It drew on a long Christian tradition of self-imposed separation from the world, which had begun in the third and fourth centuries when the hermits of Palestine and Egypt had shunned the city in favour of the desert. The many men and women who sought to emulate the lives, values and aspirations of the desert monks did so in the retreats of monastery, nunnery, hermitage and anchorhold: that is, in communities centred on the religious life or in a solitary existence.

By 1200 there was in England a well-established monastic order. There were monasteries that took as their code of life the Rule of St Benedict. There were others, like the Cistercians, who remained Benedictine but formed their own order. There were the regular canons, who since the late eleventh century had become a vital part of the English monastic scene; and there were nunneries of all orders and congregations, both large and wealthy Anglo-Saxon foundations and the smaller, often poor, houses of eastern England and the northern moors. But almost paradoxically the life of renunciation was made possible by those who lived in the world: by the material support offered to the monastic order by lay benefactors, who provided land on which a monastery could be built and endowments to yield income to maintain the community. If benefactors did not themselves live the life of renunciation, they received benefits from the monastic order, chiefly the spiritual benefits of vicarious intercession, commemoration and sometimes burial. Monks were seen as powerful intercessors for those who remained within the world, ‘cowled champions [who] may engage in ceaseless combat against Behemoth for your soul’.412

By 1200 some of England’s monastic houses were long-established, while others were a product of the great expansion of the twelfth century.

Although there was a brief flowering of the Carthusian order in the later middle ages, the era of growth was over by 1200 and religious houses, large and small, were by then a familiar part of the English townscape and countryside. But renunciation within a monastery or nunnery was not the only form of renunciation. There were, in particular, radical new developments in religious practice from the early thirteenth century, as the friars moved to England from their nerve centres in France and Italy. Unlike monks, friars actively sought to combine a pastoral and social mission with a devotion to poverty in an innovative concept of the religious life.

For all these monks, canons, nuns and friars, who collectively formed the monastic order of medieval England, the religious life was social: they shared a way of life in a community. But there were also those for whom renunciation was an individual experience: the hermits, anchorites and anchoresses of medieval England, and those, such as vowesses, who lived a religious life subject to vows but within the world. Because hermits were not part of an institution and lived alone, they did not leave records such as those generated by the great monastic houses. But we should not too quickly discount their presence and their importance in medieval religion and culture.

One of the central forms of renunciation was the giving up of material goods. St Matthew’s gospel records Christ’s advice to the rich young man who asked how he might obtain eternal life: in order to achieve perfection he should sell all that he had and give to the poor (Matthew 19:21). This created a powerful argument that material wealth and salvation were incompatible. But there were other forms of renunciation which came to be associated with the religious life of the middle ages, and one way in which we can approach the question of what the monastic, religious and eremitical life meant in medieval society is by looking at the vows which monks and canons, nuns and friars, made on their entry into the religious life and at the symbolism connected with that entry.

The religious life was first and foremost about renunciation of self and individual identity. This is highlighted in the document that formed the basis of monastic life in the medieval west, the Rule of St Benedict. On taking his vows the novice professed ‘stability, conversion of his life, and obedience’.2 The last meant total obedience to the rule and to the abbot. By obedience to the rule, monks were bound to the routine of a day organised into periods of prayer, work and reading, much of the time

' J. McCann, ed. and trans., The Rule of St Benedict (1972), ch. 58.

Being spent in silence. They were to have no will of their own but become cogs in what was increasingly a liturgical wheel, praying for the salvation of humankind.

The Rule linked the profession of obedience to humility. In Benedict’s eyes the second degree of humility is ‘that a man love not his own will’ and the third ‘that a man for the love of God subject himself to his superior in all obedience’.413 Up to the twelfth century many entrants to the religious life had no choice as to their future: these were the oblates, offered as children by their parents to the service of God and the monastery.414 From the twelfth century greater emphasis was laid on the importance of the individual will in the decision to enter the religious life, and the centuries-old practice of placing children in monasteries for entry into the religious life at an appropriate age came to an end. However, the renunciation of self-determination - if not of the personal ambition to rise through the hierarchy of the monastery or nunnery to high office — remained an essential of the monastic life. This form of renunciation was open to everyone: ‘personal standing is merged in the equality of each and all’.415

The demands of obedience are perhaps most clearly discerned within the framework of a community, but even those who lived a solitary life had to subordinate their own wills. The Ancrene Wisse, discussed by Eamon Duffy above, stressed the need for the solitary women to obey a superior: ‘each anchoress must observe the outer rule according to the advice of her confessor’.6 Members of the religious orders were not the only members of medieval society to live within a framework where some were in authority and others were not. The monastic community was, however — in theory at least — one where status disregarded birth and social rank; the authority that normally came with these markers was abandoned at the point of entry.

At the end of his year-long preparation for entry into the monastery, the first vow taken by Benedict’s novice was stability, the renunciation of freedom to move. The Church had always been suspicious of wandering religious, who placed themselves outside the establishment and beyond the control of a rule or a superior. Monks and nuns were expected to remain in the cloister for life. Although stability was the ideal, it was practised in different ways. The practicalities of monastic life meant that temporary absences were unavoidable. Abbots were figures of political, social and economic importance, and might travel widely; some monks had to leave the cloister to attend the general chapters of their orders or to study at university; and both monks and canons might serve in parish churches or hospitals. However, attempts were made to limit contact with the outside world and to ensure that absences from the monastery were minimised. The introduction by the Cistercians of the class of half monk, the conversi or lay brothers, had removed the need for monks to leave the monastery for the practical purposes of estate management and commercial enterprise. The conversi remained a significant group throughout the twelfth century, though a decline in numbers set in thereafter and this group dwindled fast after the Black Death. The external needs of cloistered women, who were thought to be particularly vulnerable, were met by lay brothers, masters or guardians, who ensured that their vocation and purity were not threatened by contact with those outside the nunnery walls.

It was thus one of the revolutionary aspects of the friars that they challenged and overturned this cornerstone of medieval monastic life. In their search for the apostolic life of mission and preaching as well as poverty, they turned their backs on fixed places to live and wandered. For the friars, the religious life meant the imitation of Christ, preaching and teaching. They were not the first to see preaching as a component of the monastic life, but never before had this resulted in the rejection of stability. By the time the friars reached England, the main orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans, had begun to establish priories as centres for their evangelical activity, but it was still a cardinal point of their existence that they did not settle but moved from place to place preaching the word of God in town and countryside, church and marketplace. Alongside this peripatetic existence, and in some ways contrary to it, was the growing dominance of the Dominicans and the Franciscans in the teaching of theology. For the Dominicans this was perhaps the logical outcome of the need for academic learning as a means to combat heresy - the purpose for which they had been founded. The effect was to promote and enliven that important medieval intellectual and social institution, the university.

At the opposite end of the scale from the friars were the anchorites and anchoresses, not just recluses from the world but inclusi/ incluse: physically shut away from it. Their cells might be found attached to parish churches (for example, the anchorhold founded by Henry, duke of Lancaster, in the parish church of Whalley), in towns (such as the

Pontefract reclusarium, established before 1240) or on bridges (the anchorhold on Doncaster bridge in the patronage of the Fitzwilliam family).416 The author of the Ancrene Wisse counselled that the anchoress profess stability, ‘that she shall never more change that place, except out of necessity only (such as violence and fear of death, obedience to her bishop or his superior)’.417 The service for the immuring of anchorites and anchoresses, as also for the entry of lepers into leprosaria, was the office of the dead, symbolising that they were thenceforth ‘dead to the world’.

If monks and nuns professed stability and anchorites and anchoresses, walled in their cells, were restricted from travel, this was not necessarily the case with hermits. Some hermitages were firmly established in a particular location, but many hermits were free to wander. This was taken increasingly as a threat to the stability of Church and society, and measures were taken to regulate and control movement. This might involve placing hermits and hermitages under the authority of nearby religious houses, or increasing episcopal supervision. William Langland was typical of late fourteenth-century attitudes in his fierce criticism of false hermits: those who sought an easy life under the guise of holy men. The legislation of 1389 that ordered hermits to carry letters of accreditation from their local bishop was part of an anti-vagrancy statute.418 There were clearly tensions over stability in concepts of the monastic life and this is reflected in lay society, which by the fourteenth century was suspicious of those who in the widest sense lacked stability, whether they were hermits or beggars, or, indeed, single women living outside a family.

Benedict’s novice also promised ‘conversion of life’: the commitment to change his or her life. This was often marked by a change of name. It was also accompanied by a change of clothes: adopting a monastic habit was symbolic of the renunciation of society, property and personality. Conversely, if a monk rejected the monastic life and left the monastery, his old clothes would be returned to him. Part of the service of the making of a hermit involved the blessing of his clothes by the bishop. The brown habit and white scapular of the hermit, illustrated in the pontifical of Bishop Clifford of London (d.1421), ‘signified humility of heart, chastity and contempt for the world and worldly things’, and the words spoken by the bishop were, ‘The Lord put on thee the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness’ (Ephesians 4:24). For the author of the Ancrene Wisse clothing had another significance: plain clothing was the sign of a lack of vanity.11 Above all, however, the change of clothing associated with entry into the religious life symbolised the rejection of family and society. Richard Rolle, the hermit of Hampole who wrote Ego Dormio for his ‘dear sister in Christ’, a woman who had just become or was considering becoming a nun at the Yorkshire convent of Yedingham, urged his reader that spiritual reward would follow ‘if you abandon everything which you derive human pleasure from and cease to be preoccupied by your friends and relations’.12 Human relationships were seen to distract from the religious vocation, and heavenly delights were to be preferred to earthly joys.

It is important not to exaggerate the divide between monastic and lay society or to underestimate the interaction between the two. Connections with family were often maintained, and monks and nuns might be given episcopal licence to visit their relatives. Monasteries and nunneries had a social function beyond the provision of intercession for humankind. They were places of hospitality; members of the gentry or mercantile classes purchased corrodies (the provision of lodging or food, often in their old age, in return for a lump sum); children were placed there to be educated; and the poor gathered to receive alms.

Hermits, too, could have a social function. Work was a part of their daily routine, and the rules surviving from late medieval England indicate that this might also bring them into contact with lay society. The repair of roads and bridges was one way in which the hermit could earn his keep. Even anchorites were not totally isolated. The Ancrene Wisse, for instance, assumes some contact, albeit regrettable, with the outside world:

They say about anchoresses that each has to have an old woman to feed her ears: a jabberer who jabbers to her all the stories of the area... so that it is said in a proverb ‘From mill and from market, from smithy and from anchor-hold people bring the news’. Christ knows, this is a sad saying, that the anchor-house, which should be the most solitary place of all, has to be linked with those three places in which there is most chatter.

Moreover the legislation that restricted the size of the windows of anchorholds, forbade anchorites to hear confession or to use their cells to store valuables, suggests that, like hermits, those who had been immured and were ‘dead to the world’ still had a social function within it.

The exchange of spiritual and mystical literature reinforces this point. The Book of Showings of the Norwich recluse Julian was written for an outside audience, and Julian was visited by Margery Kempe. Richard Rolle wrote not only Ego Dormio for a would-be nun but also The Commandment for a nun of Hampole and The Form of Living for his disciple, the Rich-mondshire recluse Margaret Kirkby. It was mental and spiritual detachment rather than mere physical isolation that the late medieval recluse required. A striking illustration of such a search for solitude is found in the Carthusian order. Carthusian houses were group hermitages. The monastic complex - now best viewed at Mount Grace in Yorkshire - comprised a modest church for a limited number of communal services and, around a large cloister, individual cells where the monks lived, prayed, read, worked their garden and often wrote and copied mystical texts. The last employment constituted preaching and teaching, but without face-to-face contact. From their cells the monks were responsible for the transmission of major theological and devotional works. Although they had renounced the world, they still communicated with it. Paradoxically, the fourteenth-century burst of Carthusian foundations was encouraged by the patronage of men in the court circle of Richard II. Mount Grace, for instance, was founded by the king’s nephew Thomas Holland, and Epworth by Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk. Their support for the order arose from their admiration for the high standard of Carthusian observance and the order’s great austerity. This not only guaranteed the efficacy of their prayers and intercessions but also in itself held a profound appeal for a materialistic society. The aristocratic patronage brought the Carthusians from their ‘desert’ to urban centres, and the London charterhouse was built adjacent to a burial ground of victims of the Black Death.

As part of the renunciation of self, the Rule of St Benedict demanded that a monk give up all personal goods. As an integrated member of a community, all his physical needs would be met by that community and there was no need for private possessions. The monastic ideal of communal living found one justification in the description in the earliest Christian community in Jerusalem, among whom all things were held in common (Acts 2:44-5). However, from the twelfth century, and increasingly in the thirteenth, the monastic orders faced challenges from less formal movements that interpreted the apostolic life not merely in terms of common ownership of property but as the observation of poverty and the act of preaching. The renewed emphasis on poverty was part of an antipathy towards an increasingly prosperous and economically complex society: St Francis, founder of the Franciscan friars, deliberately rejected his privileged upbringing. But the real novelty of the friars was that they rejected corporate as well as individual possessions. The Regula Bullata, the final version of Francis’s rule, refers to the ‘eminence of loftiest poverty’, the virtue of serving God ‘in poverty and humility’, and a radical withdrawal from the world of buying and selling marked by a ban on handling money.419 The aim of the friars was to be on terms of equality with the poorest of the poor. For Francis this poverty was absolute, extending to the denial of places to live and ownership of property. The Dominicans, who initially embraced poverty but accepted places to live, came to imitate the Franciscans in their interpretation of absolute poverty. The friars were wanderers, and they were to be sustained by begging. Labour was to be casual, rather than - as in the Rule of St Benedict - an essential component of the monastic life.

Such radical ideals were not easy to maintain, and in England as elsewhere a fierce debate emerged - almost from the death of Francis - on the nature of poverty and what it actually signified. The Franciscans saw poverty as an imitation of the poverty of Christ, as well as the renunciation of property in the search for evangelism. Just as Christ lived without a home and died without possessions, so too should the friars. However, differences soon emerged among the friars themselves about poverty and about the concepts of use and dominion, or ownership; and modifications were made to the rule. In 1230 the pope allowed the Franciscans to have ‘spiritual friends’ who could hold money on their behalf, and the further provision (in 1247) whereby the spiritual friend became a legal representative in all business matters undermined the very roots of the order.

Quite how things had changed in England over a generation can be seen in Thomas of Eccleston’s account of the coming of the Franciscans to England, written in 1258-9. In many ways Thomas was looking back to a pioneering or golden age, and his remarks evoke an era when the friars embraced poverty absolutely. He held up as a shining example of the first Franciscan novices in England Brother Solomon, who

Once visited his sister to beg alms. She brought him some bread, but turned away her face saying ‘Cursed be the hour that I ever saw you’. But he joyfully accepted the bread and went on his way. So strictly did he accept the rule of absolute poverty to which he was vowed that he would sometimes bring back in his cloak a little flour, salt, a few figs or an armful of wood for the benefit of some sick brother. But he was very careful never to accept or keep anything that was not an absolute necessity.15

Thomas also explained how the idea of ‘spiritual friends’ worked in England:

At Canterbury, Sir Alexander, warden of the priests’ hospice, transferred to them a plot of ground and built them a chapel large enough for their present needs. And since the brethren refused to accept property as their own, it was held by the city council, and the brethren used it by the goodwill of the citizens.16

But a golden age it was, and in letting slip that ‘in those days the friars were very strict about erecting buildings and possessing pictures’, Thomas suggested that things were different in his own day.17 His record makes clear the difficulties the friars had in reconciling success and their concept of poverty.

The debate about Franciscan poverty occupied a central place in medieval religious debate. The implications were far-reaching, for the Franciscan claim that Christ owned nothing set absolute poverty as the ultimate goal for all religious, both monastic and those in the hierarchy of the Church. This led to fierce controversy, in which English friars took a full part. In 1249—51 William of Nottingham, English prior provincial (that is, head of the Franciscans in England), took a stand against relaxations in the rule. Adam Marsh, a noted Franciscan and confessor of King Henry III, refused money, and in 1241 an English delegation petitioned the general, Haymo of Faversham, on behalf of the English province, to hold fast to the rule as composed by Francis. English friars, as Knowles wrote, ‘united to preserve the first purity of the Rule’.18 The culmination of the debate was the papal bull Cum inter nonnullos of 1323, which declared heretical the belief that Christ and his apostles owned nothing.

For all religious orders, however, the differentiation between personal and corporate poverty could be difficult to justify to the outside world. By the later middle ages the friars as well as the traditional monastic orders were facing criticism for their wealth. John Wyclif was of the opinion that

Thomas of Eccleston, The Coming of the Franciscans, trans. L. Sherley-Price (1964), p. 8.

D. Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, I: 1216—1340 (Cambridge, 1948), pp. 143—5.

‘it would be to the advantage of the kingdom, were the expenses of which friars despoil kingdoms to be distributed to the poor for the building of humble houses’.420

Although it was not one of the formal vows taken by monks and nuns, chastity was a fundamental of the monastic life, as it was by this period for the secular clergy also. This meant renunciation of marriage and sexual relations. For some it meant lifelong virginity; for others the assumption of a life of self-denial after widowhood.421 This is one area in which attitudes seem to have been gendered. Chastity and virginity might be invested with different meanings for men and women. There may have been men for whom denial of sex and sexuality was an important dynamic behind the decision to enter religion. Religious writing - and it is important to remember that this writing was for the most part by men - suggests that it was perceived, or represented, as even more important for women. Idung of Prufening, a twelfth-century Cluniac monk who converted to the Cistercians, drew attention to the difference between the sexes when he stated that a woman could lose her virginity by violence, ‘a thing which in the masculine sex nature itself prevents’. A common way of describing female chastity was as a vessel that had to be guarded. For Idung a consecrated woman was ‘a glass vessel’ because of her fragility and a ‘golden vessel’ because of her virginity. The twelfth-century Cistercian abbot, Ailred of Rievaulx, whose letter to his sister influenced many writers on the religious life, spoke of ‘an earthen vessel in which gold is stored for testing’. This imagery is carried into the Ancrene Wisse. When speaking of the need to ‘flee the world’, the author counsels thus:

The person who was carrying a costly liquid, a precious fluid, such as balsam is, in a fragile container, linctus in a brittle glass, would she not go out of the crowd, unless she were a fool? .. . This brittle container - that is, woman’s flesh... is as brittle as any glass, for should it once be broken, it will never be mended, mended or whole as it was before, any more than glass.422

Solitude and strict enclosure were the means to preserve the fragile vessel.

For religious women - more than religious men - virginity was represented as the highest and most exalted aspect of the religious life. This was the message that the predominantly male-authored treatises on the religious life continued to promote to potential nuns. Not all insisted on spiritual motives, and the renunciation of sex and marriage could have practical advantages. The author of Holy Virginity, written around 1200, follows an established tradition in stressing the transitory joys of marriage and its many dangers and pains. A woman is urged to avoid marriage:

By God, woman, even if it were not at all for the love of God, or for the hope of heaven, or for the fear of hell, you should avoid this act [marriage] above all things, for the integrity of your flesh, for the sake of your body, and for your physical health.

For a woman, the chaste life of the nun offered the opportunity to control her own body, an empowerment to escape the social control of marriage. In this instance renunciation was a positive, not a negative, choice.

Nunneries, however, were not just the refuge of the physical virgin. Women could enter religion as widows, and here we see a separate notion of virginity, spiritual virginity. The ‘golden vessel’ could not physically be restored, but a woman could be - as Margery Kempe, mother of fourteen put it - ‘a virgin in her soul’. Virginity could now be possessed by wives and widows. It was not necessary even to enter the convent walls, and many widows in the later middle ages took a vow of chastity. The ceremony for profession of a vowess included the taking of a veil and receiving of a ring, but without retreat to a nunnery. The women known to have taken this route were generally wealthy enough to be self-supporting, such as Cecily, widow of Sir Thomas Gerard, who in 1491 took an oath of perpetual chastity and was invested with the veil, ring and mantle ‘which customarily signify this state’.424 Perhaps for such women part of the attraction of the move was that it ensured their future independence.

Renunciation of sex and marriage was therefore an important and enduring facet of the religious life. From the earliest days of Christianity a pervasive strand of thought had been that the woman who renounced marriage and child-bearing to serve Christ rose above her sex. She became a man, the virile woman.425 However, in another important way religious women retained their sexuality as the brides of Christ. Again, this is quite gender-specific. Holy Virginity is one of many treatises to ‘exploit the sexuality of the nuptial image. Christ is seen in graphically physical, male terms; he is ardent, generous, and far more attractive than any earthly counterpart could be’.426 The nun remains chaste for her bridegroom. The Life of St Gilbert of Sempringham, written in and reflecting the attitudes of the early years of the thirteenth century, employs the same metaphors. The desire for sexual purity led to strict segregation. Those Gilbertine houses which accommodated both men and women were indeed ‘double houses’, with two cloisters, two sets of monastic buildings and a shared church divided down the centre by a high wall. The ‘window house’ in the passage which joined the male and female quarters was strictly guarded by a canon on one side and two nuns on the other. A small window allowed for necessary conversation (without eye contact) and a larger allowed for the food prepared on the women’s side to be passed to the men.

This discussion has demonstrated different ways in which the concept of renunciation - of self-determination, of an individual place within society, of identity as a member of a family, of personal property, of materialism and of sex - set members of the religious orders apart from other members of society and was central to their existence. It was central, too, to lay perceptions of the role of the religious: those ‘cowled champions’ who prayed for them and commemorated them in institutions which would - it was thought - last for ever. Those who renounced the world enabled those who did not to live their lives in the hope of salvation. It is small wonder that in times of particular turbulence men and women turned to the monastic order for spiritual support. Walter Daniel described how Ailred as abbot of Revesby took advantage of the turbulence of King Stephen’s reign to encourage knights to endow monasteries, since in so doing they would gain life rather than lose it.427

The numbers of men and women who in one way or another participated in the monastic life in medieval England is impossible to estimate. The numbers varied over the centuries; they were at their height in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and were badly hit by the crisis of the Black Death.428 By 1530 there were in England and Wales at least 825 religious houses, comprising some 502 monasteries, 136 nunneries, and 187 friaries.429 Together these housed in the region of 7,500 men and 1,800 women, which has been estimated as one in 375 of the population, and this figure does not include hermits and anchorites. Although the numbers were lower than they had been in the heyday of monasticism, renunciation was still a way of life for a significant proportion of the population and, as noted above, it was a way of life that commanded the respect of many who did not feel called to emulate it. As late as 1481-2 Edward IV founded a house for the Observant Franciscans at Greenwich.

By 1540, however, the monastic order had ceased to exist, and monasteries, nunneries and friaries were no longer a part of English society. Some historians have argued that the lack of opposition to the closure of the monasteries indicates that the very concept of renunciation was outmoded. When political strategy dictated the dissolution, there was little will to resist. To generalise about lay attitudes towards monasticism on the basis of the dissolution is difficult. By the later middle ages the monastic way of life had indeed come under criticism from a variety of sources for a variety of reasons. But the nature of that criticism suggests that renunciation was still important to people. What was being criticised was usually the lack of renunciation: the wealth of many houses and the alleged low level of observance within them. This was compatible with continuing lay support for local religious houses. Among early sixteenth-century testators in the York diocese, for instance, the favoured target for bequests was their parish church, but a quarter still left money to the friars for masses and prayers, and an eighth to monasteries; and the closure of the monasteries in the diocese met with opposition from within monastic and lay society.430

As this implies, it was not primarily awareness that men and women vowed to the religious life might fall short of their profession that hastened the end of the monastic order. Over the centuries monasteries had lost their monopoly on a number of functions: education, the production of manuscripts, pastoral responsibility and the commemoration of the dead. By the 1530s these could all be provided outside the walls of the monastery. But the problem can be seen as more fundamental. By the late middle ages ascetic renunciation of the world was no longer seen as the only, or indeed the best, way to salvation. It was not that the ideal of renunciation was rejected but that it began to take different forms. For the active Christian, life within society involved renunciation in different ways.