Church and Monastery

In medieval Europe, thousands of men and women devoted their lives to the Christian Church, working, praying and studying in monasteries and nunneries. Monasteries became centres of learning.

Men and women who became monks and nuns obeyed rules originally set down in the 500s by, among others, St Benedict of Nursia. He taught that a monk or nun should be poor, unmarried and obedient. Monks wore simple robes, shaved their heads and lived together in communities known as monasteries. The head of the monastery was the abbot. Some later abbots managed large estates and even commanded knights, the head of a nunnery, a religious house for women, was called an abbess.

Monks and nuns followed a daily programme of prayer and worship, attending up to eight services every day. Monks ate together in a dinning hall, called the refectory, and worked in the fields or in workshops. Later, lay brothers (workers who were not monks) did the heaviest work. Monks cared for the sick in the monastery’s infirmary, gave food and shelter to travelers, and carefully copied books, creating brilliantly coloured letters and pictures, called illuminations. These books were kept in the large monastery libraries, so preserving ancient knowledge.

There were several organizations, or orders, of monks. These included the Benedictines, Carthusians and Cistercians. In the 1200s, new orders of travelling preachers, know as friars, were formed. Friars of the Francisan order (founded by St Francis of Assisi) did not live inside monastery walls, but wandered the countryside preaching Christianity to the people. 

CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS

Pilgrims in the Middle Ages made long journeys to visit holy places and shrines, which could hold the bones or tomb of a saint or some other holy relic. In England, the most famous shrine was that of St Thomas a Becket at Canterbury.