The Benedictines, the Cistercians and the acquisition of a hermitage in twelfth-century Durham

Abstract

Twelfth-century England witnessed a rapid rearrangement of its religious landscape as new monastic orders jostled with established ones in their struggle for spiritual influence and material possessions. Amid the shifting priorities of ecclesiastical and monastic politics, the hermitage as a paradigm represented a purity of tradition which hailed from the very infancy of the Church, embodying continuity, stability and an ancient spirituality which even an order as committed to communal living as the Cistercians seems to have been drawn to. In this climate of change the new and old orders alike sought to rediscover and bind themselves to the spiritual roots of monasticism. Their general desire to do so was demonstrated by the attention they paid to hermits, not only through the production of numerous hagiographies, but also by the establishment of religious houses upon existing hermitages. During the twelfth century more hermitages seem to have been transformed into monastic houses than at any other period of English history, yet the circumstances in which these transformations took place have been much understudied. One of the best documented examples is the hermitage at Finchale in Durham and for this reason it will form the subject of this article.