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August 2002

Parish History Episode 16

The New Monastism

Last month's article described the establishment of a parochial system in England, in the wake of the Viking conquests. That system grew partly in response to the decay of the monasteries which had once been the glory of the English Church. Those monastic houses which had survived the chaos of the Viking onslaught seemed to have lost touch with the ancient austerity of the Benedictine system The Family of Saint Cuthbert, the most prominent monastic community in what is now County Durham, custodians of the cathedral at Chester-le-Street, had somehow evolved into a society of married men - hardly monks by any traditional standard.

But new unities of Benedictine monks had arisen in France, a land which had possibly suffered even more than England as a result of the great rates by the Vikings, the Magyars and the Saracens. The most influential of these new monastic families was that associated with Cluny in Burgundy, and this (louse was to send out parties of monks to refound the lost monasteries of France and Germany, and of Flanders and England. Those who argue to England were to settle largely in the Fenlands - both in the Fens of Somerset, often known as the Somerset Levels, and in the much vaster tracts of Fenland to be found in Eastern England around Peterborough and Ely.

These areas had previously been almost uninhabited, but refugees facing from the Vikings had taken shelter there, including most notably King Alfred of Wessex, who found a hiding-place on the Isle of Athelney, in the midst of the Somerset Levels, where he planned a come back, and a restoration of his kingdom. and also inadvertently burned some cakes. Some Cluniacs came to the site of Alfred's camp at Athehey, and founded a new monastery there, both as a sort of memorial to the King's achievements, and as a hope for the revival of the English Church These men may have had French leaders, but they were mostly English monks, eager to reform the English Church.

The most influential of these new Fenland monasteries was to be that founded on Glastonbury Tor in the 930's. The first Abbot of Glastonbury was Dunstan, a man with a fair for publicity, who was to preside at the funeral of King Edmund 946, the first of several royal funerals to be held at Glastonbury, and who also seems to have begun to circulate the legend that his abbey was not a new creation, but rather a restoration of a monastery founded there shortly after the Crucifixion by Joseph of Arimathea. This in itself gave Glastonbury Immense prestige, and in later, more settled, generations scholars and poets were prone to seeing there the for flowers of British Christianity (and it was a lot easier of access from London or Oxford than was Iona, or Lindisfarne) and the roots, roots of an Anglican form of Christianity, which could be seen as more ancient even than Rome or the Eastern Patriarchates. Mediaeval romance took the legend even further, making Glastonbury the site of King Arthur's Court, and the place to find the Holy Grail.
In 959, King Edgar "the Peaceable' (see last month's article) invited Dunstan to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Dunstan also became prominent in the King's Witan, and advised him on how to bring about that peace and stability for the English Kingdom which Edgar made it his aim to achieve, Ile was a vastly more practical man than those Northumbrian saints of an earlier age, like Aidan and Cuthbert, who had also given counsel to kings. For instance, one Easter at Canterbury, Dunstan learned that the execution of some forgers who had been caught passing false coins into circulation had been delayed, because of the holiness of the season, and because they were wishing to petition the king for clemency. He was so furious with the Sheriff of Kent, who had ordered the postponement, that he threatened to forbid any celebration that Easter Day. He pointed out that the prosperity of the Kingdom depended on a sound financial system, and that this could only be assured if all rogues and swindlers were ruthlessly eliminated. He got his way, the Sheriff hung the forgers on Easter morning, and Mass was duly celebrated.

Some will see this as implying criticism of Dunstan's saintliness. But however rough and ready justice was, law and order were returning to England and to all Europe after a generation or two of almost complete anarchy. The Abbey at Peterborough, on the main road between Northumbria arid London, was soon to become the model for a revived monasticism in the North-East of England. But the Family of Saint Cuthbert were to have many adventures yet, before they became truly absorbed into the new-style Cluniac restoration of the Benedictine rule.

Elsewhere in Europe, the Cluniacs, and other communities of Reformed Benedictines. were spreading Christianity throughout the continent. Christian kingdoms were reemerging in Northern Spain after two centuries of Moorish rule. Poland and other Slav kingdoms were drawn into Christendom, and even Scandinavia and Hungary themselves, the homelands of the Viking and Magyar raiders who had destroyed the older Europe, were being invaded by Christian missionaries.

Even more spectacular perhaps was the expansion of Byzantine Christianity, which was adopted as the Faith of Russia and Bulgaria, the two leading Slavonic kingdoms of that time, and which encouraged the translation of the Bible and other Christian literature into Slavonic. The "New Rome" at Constantinople still held much that the Latin Church had lost, or never had The office of Ecumenical Patriarch at Constantinople was a source of power, or at least influence, throughout Orthodox Christendom, while the power and influence of the Roman Papacy was, in the Tenth Century, in abeyance. There was a wide degree of literacy in the East of Europe, at least in Greek and Slavonic, and there was an ample supply of books to satisfy the needs of an educated readership, while what few books existed in the West were largely in Latin, which could only be understood with difficulty even in those lands such as Prance and Italy where dialects descended from Latin were still spoken, and very few people, even of the nobility or royalty, were literate either in Latin or in their own vernacular. Above all, there was in the East a strong tradition of spiritual leadership by a monastic movement which was still, at that time, vigorous and attractive. and was in the process of expanding the bounds of Christendom to the Volga and the Don: while in the West or Europe many of the monasteries, whose wealth had tempted the barbarians. still lay desecrated and desolate, a force from the past.

But as we have seen, new life was stirring amongst the ruins. From Cluny and elsewhere new impulses were spreading, reviving and reinvigorating the ancient Benedictine Rule. These impulses would eventually reach Durham.