Religious Orders

Abstract

On the eve of their suppression, signs of a continuing spiritual vigour in the religious orders were by no means wholly absent. They were most conspicuous amongst the Carthusians, especially at Mount Grace, and in the Bridgettine house at Syon. In communities like Woolstrope, too, even the dissolution commissioners would find the monks ‘of right good conversation, and living religiously’. On the other hand there is also occasional evidence of drunkenness and sexual incontinence, and substantially more frequent evidence of a preference for individual convenience, material comfort and contact with the outer world. Such declensions from the monastic ideal were reported not only by royal commissioners but also by earlier ecclesiastical visitors, like the Bishop of Lincoln at Peterborough and Ramsey abbeys in 1518. The extant buildings of great houses like Fountains or Rievaulx confirm a pre-reformation trend towards display towers, meat kitchens, divided dormitories, comfortable private chambers and well-appointed abbatial lodgings. In about 1500 a foreigner described England’s major monasteries as ‘more like baronial palaces than religious houses’.¹